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My mother hates math and will swear up and down that she's a dunce when it comes to numbers. My father will then roll his eyes and tell you all you have to do is add a dollar sign and a decimal point and her math I.Q. sky-rockets into the genius range. I don't know about that, but I can tell you this–as a kid, my mother was fearful that I would turn out to be a mathematics simpleton and so her arithmetic issues pervaded my after-school activities. I was inflicted with flash cards, force-fed multiplication tables and spent hours laboring over long division. Hours!

Of course, I asked the age-old questions about how long division could possibly be relevant once I achieved adulthood. Mom's pat response was that I would need all matter of number magic in order to cope with grown-up activities like balancing my checkbook and shopping for food.

Now, thanks to her vigilant tutelage, I can instantaneously calculate the price per potato in a five pound bag of Idahos with savant-like precision. Well, not really, but she reads this blog, so yes, I can. For years I played the diligent shopper and like so many of us, I “did the math” when I was out shopping, ever in search of the Better Buy.

It's a Trap

At a certain point, however, my Virgo logic kicked in and I started questioning the Better Buy myth. Every time I threw away that second head of lettuce from a BOGO deal or had to make yet another loaf of banana bread from the bananas I didn't get to, I had to wonder. Was I doing something wrong? I mean, I was clipping coupons like crazy and I was even pretty sure I could spot one of those better buy deals across three aisles. Something wasn't quite right…

Then one day, as I was throwing away the half a loaf of banana bread I never got around to eating—made from half a bunch of bananas I never got around to eating—I had a stunning revelation:

If I'm throwing it away, it isn't a better buy–no matter how good a deal I got.

Voilà! Wasted food is wasted cash any way you look at it.

(Price) Point to Ponder

So here's a hypothetical for you. Kind of a word problem, except I'm doing the math so you won't have to. You can thank me later. 

Let's say you need two pears for a simple dessert recipe. You go to the store and find that organic pears are 89¢ each. Or you can pick up a bag of five commercially grown pears for $3.49. Which option is the best choice?

Here is where we get tripped up. The commercially grown pears may seem like the better buy at about 20¢ less per pear, but are they really? Let's put aside the chemicals and pesticides for a minute (Honestly, don't we already know that we shouldn't be putting that crap into our bodies anyway?) and do the real math.

You only need two pears. If you buy five, the chances are pretty good that three of them are going to go bad and get thrown away. Cold hard cash translation? You just threw away $2.07. That's already more than the $1.78 you would have spent on the two organic pears you needed. Not to mention, had you only bought the two organic pears over the pre-packaged, less healthy pears, you would have saved $1.71 to begin with.

Better buy schmetter buy—the simple truth is that if you put your mind to it, you can buy better food while spending (and wasting!) less money.