Food For Thought

 Read more Oily Rag articles by Frank and Muriel Newman

A hearty, healthy and frugal breakfast is a great way to start the day. There are endless ways to prepare a breakfast feast when living off the smell of an oily rag. There are so many possibilities that what you prepare will depend on what you have available in your penny pinchers’ pantry (the one stocked with bargain buys) – or what’s plentiful and cheap at the time.

Most people include a cereal of some kind in their breakfast, which got an oily rag reader wondering which cereal was the best value for money. To find the answer we dusted off the calculator and browsed the on-line isles of a major supermarket which we use as our "sample store".

We looked at their house brand products and took six of the most common breakfast cereals. To make comparison easier, we worked out the cost for 100 grams of cereal. This is what we found:

The result is pretty clear. Rolled oats takes out the gold medal for thrifty breakfasts and by a clear margin from the rest of the field. There you go oily raggers, start the day the frugal way by tucking into a nice dish of steaming hot rolled oats. No doubt after a while plain old rolled oats may seem a little ordinary so why not dress it up with some in-season fruit and home-made yoghurt.

The silver medal goes to Cornflakes, closely followed by traditional muesli in the bronze position. Wheat biscuits came in a close fourth. Bran and sultanas was at the rear end of our sample group, at almost three times the price of rolled oats. In other words, for every $10 someone spends on bran and sultanas for breakfast, because the equivalent cost for rolled oats would be $3.50, they could save $6.50 by switching over! That’s $6.50 they would then have for the other essentials.

Having established the cheapest buy, we then moved on to one of our oily rag hobby-horses. We wanted to know how much you could save if you bought the house brand (the one in the plain dull and boring packaging) instead of the branded products (that ones that are colourfully packaged, that do attract your attention and are conveniently placed on the easy-to-reach shelves, and are flashed all over TV during the kids’ programmes).

To make the comparison fair, we took an equivalent product in the same or similar sized packet. Here are the results.

Wow! Look at the savings you can make by switching to house branded products. You could save between 17 percent and 33 percent, and the average saving over the six items was 27 percent. In other words, for every $10 you spend on cereals in fancy packets, you could save $2.70 to spend on something else, by buying house brand products.

Before you go and say, “but…but… but”, just be aware that in many cases the product in the plain packaging is exactly the same product that is found in the fancy boxes. It looks the same, it tastes the same – it is the same. You don’t eat the packaging (unless you are really hungry!) so we don’t see much point paying for it when it just gets thrown away!

If you have a favourite breakfast tip or recipe send it in to us so that we can share it with others. You can contact us via the oily rag website (www.oilyrag.co.nz) or write to Living Off the Smell of an Oily Rag, PO Box 984, Whangarei.

* Frank and Muriel Newman are the authors of Living Off the Smell of an Oily Rag in NZ. Readers can submit their oily rag tips on-line at www.oilyrag.co.nz. The book is available from bookstores and online at www.oilyrag.co.nz.