Jonathan's slightly less boring-but-useful site

If the entries seem to have dried up a little, it’s because there’s nothing much to report: I haven’t run out of food, and nothing terrible has happened. Last night I finished up some leftover shallots & tomatoes and  the £2 bacon offcuts I bought last week in a pasta sauce, with plenty left over for lunch today. Because I’m not filling the fridge with more and more stuff from the supermarket that I’m not sure if I want or not, I’m just using the stuff I already have more creatively and thoughtfully.

Looking at other blogs by people who’ve done the same challenge, one of the most frequent observations is that even if some items are more expensive in local shops, overall you save money because you only buy what you went out for. You don’t walk around the supermarket in a  daze, picking things off the shelves because they’re ‘on offer’ or look appetizing, only to throw them away, leave them unused in the store cupboard, or eat them in preference to what you already have.

I have also saved an enormous amount of time. Supermarkets are attractive places. They’re enormous, bewildering, beguiling. I can’t calculate the amount of time I have saved by not standing in front of 10 brands of the same thing trying to work out which one is cheaper, or looking at a hundred different cuts and types of meat, wondering which one I want (even though I didn’t go in for meat in the first place).

Satsumas from Sunfresh in Tooting

I don’t really like satsumas, but I have to buy them for my parents who like them because they’re easy to peel and eat, and if you’re lucky, have no pips in. What I hate about buying them is that it’s so hard to get out of a supermarket without two bags of them. I never want more than about half of one bag, let alone two. I have probably thrown away more old, dry or rotten satsumas than anything else in the house.

The ones I got at Sunfresh in Tooting were large, juicy, sweet, easy to peel, and 59p per pound. Price at Sainsbury’s? 5 satsumas in a bag, £2.00 (40p each), 5 loose, £1.37. Price per kilo, £2.50, or per pound, £1.13 – which is nearly double the price of Sunfresh.

The other big surprise today was that the things I’d assumed were much cheaper in Sainsbury’s – regular brand stuff like Kleenex, Andrex, and packs of kitchen roll etc., were more or less the same price (£1.99 instead of £1.98 for loo-rolls for example) not allowing for any temporary special offers.  I now understand that all the hours I’ve spent examining the special offers in Sainsburys on these things is wasted. I could walk to the end of my road and do just as well, but until I started this 30-days-without-a-supermarket challenge, I hadn’t bothered to check.