Food Prices for Cook for Good Top 20

Use the chart below to find food bargains and to spend your money for organic and sustainably-raised food wisely. It shows the current prices for a serving of twenty ingredients used year round. Cook for Good will track prices for these items each month and show the rise or fall of the cost of the basics in our menus. (See the serving sizes at the bottom of the page and the definitions of regular and green.)

June 2009 — If you could buy just one serving of each of these items, the total cost for the regular servings would be $3.57, down from $3.40 last month. The green servings would be $4.67, down from $5.37. Going from regular to green would cost $1.10 or increase your grocery bill by 31%. Compare to prices from May 2009.

Getting the most for your money this month

The Cook for Good Top 20 list is in order by the difference in the cost between the regular and green versions of each item, so you can easily see where going green will cost you the least. Organic onions were actually a penny less a serving than conventionally grown ones and apples cost the same either way. So you could go green on a serving of potatoes for 45 cents or for the same price go green on a serving of onions, apples, diced tomatoes, carrots, rotini, cabbage, olive oil, rice, tea, kidney beans, raisins, peanut butter, and butter... and still have five cents left over.

What's going on? The June markets still have excellent spring produce and are beginning to have the fruits and veggies of summer. Cows produce the most milk in the spring, so cheese prices are low. Eggs are down from their winter peak. You'll see the seasonal drop in prices even more strongly when you look at the whole shopping list, since the Top 20 focuses on items available year round.

See a larger version of this chart. || See the analysis and charts for May, April, March, February, or January 2009.

Serving sizes

top 20 core items	serving size
all-purpose flour	1/4 cup
apples	1 small apple (5 1/4 ounces, 2 3/4" across)
butter	1 tablespoon
cabbage	1 cup chopped
carrots	1/2 large carrot (2 1/2 ounces, 8 inches long)
cheddar cheese	1 ounce
eggs	1 egg
kidney beans, dry	1/2 cup, cooked
milk, 2%	1 cup
olive oil	1 tablespoon
onions	1/4 large onion
peanut butter	2 tablespoons
potatoes	1 medium potato (8 ounces)
raisins	1/4 cup
rice	1/4 cup dry (1/2 cup cooked)
rotini, high-protein	3/4 cups (dry and cooked)
sugar*	1 tablespoon
tea	1 cup
tomatoes, diced	1/2 cup (7 ounces)
yeast, rapid-rise*	2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet)

* Sugar and yeast are always show just the regular price, since the green versions are so expensive as to not be practical.