Grocery-free year off to strong start
Family saving money and helping others along way
When someone gave the Harvey family a block of cheese on February 1, it was greeted with great excitement — it was the first time anyone in the family had tasted cheese for a month.
“The kids were really missing their cheese, but it didn’t do them any harm to go without it,” Lydia Harvey says.
Last year Harvey, her husband Matt and their four children embarked on a mission to spend no money on groceries for the whole of 2017.
After their youngest child, Ashton, was diagnosed with coeliac disease at the age of 3, Lydia and Matt began to think seriously about their lifestyle and the food their family was eating.
“I started wondering why our food was making him sick. And then I started . . . reading all the ingredients on packets and googling anything that I didn’t understand,” says Harvey. “I realised that so much of what we eat isn’t even proper food.”
And the idea of spending no money on food for a year began when Lydia realised that the wages from her job in hospitality just covered the family’s food bill.
Now, along with producing fruit, vegetables and eggs from their own garden, the couple acquire food through a type of bartering arrangement.
“We always have so much surplus, and we give what we have — fruit, vegetables, eggs, baking — and although we don’t ask for anything in return, people are happy to give back to us,” Lydia told the Wanganui Chronicle last year.
One month into the project, Lydia said with summer in full
So much of what we eat isn’t even proper food. Lydia Harvey
swing the family has been feasting on plenty of seasonal fruit and vegetables.
Although it hasn’t been the best summer for the garden, she said they have still had enough to give plenty to people who were struggling.
However, their “zero groceries” experiment got off to a shaky start when Lydia decided against stockpiling food on New Year’s Eve — and then the family went on a day trip to Taupo.
“The kids were . . . nagging us for takeaways,” she said.
“It would have been really easy to just stop and buy some chips, which is what we would have done in the past. The thing about spending no money on food is that you have to be really organised.”
As well as growing food in their Gonville garden, the Harveys forage and barter for food. Lydia bakes for friends who give her baking ingredients in return. Or she’ll help someone with their garden in return for a share of the vegetables.
She said a major positive from the experiment has been teaching other people how to cut down on their food bill.
The family has saved so much by not buying groceries that they’ve had money to go away on summer holidays.
“The kids [ have] become quite good at foraging for food. It means they have to think about where their food is coming from.”
But she admits she’s nervous about how the family will cope during winter and has been bottling and preserving as much produce as she can.
Lydia says they didn’t need to buy toiletries during January thanks to an anonymous donation left on their doorstep.
The box contained a note saying, “I remember the time you helped me.”