A Blast from the Past: Portion Control and Cost Per Serving

As more and more of us grow more and more obese, inflation continues to beat us about the head and shoulders relentlessly, and we get waylaid by rollercoaster gas prices, the simple concepts of portion control and cost per serving inevitably get put on the back burner, if they ever even make it to the stovetop.

An effective way to help you help yourself against the onslaught of all three foes (obesity, inflation, and gas prices) is to learn to practice the lost arts of portion control and calculating cost per serving.

In the case of most foods, a single serving size consists of ½ cup (except meats—consult the package nutrition label on the back for accuracy). The Food Guide Pyramid gives us a general idea of proper serving sizes in separate food categories to attain the “ideal” 2000 calories/day, and for most foods, it is ½ cup.

In the case of dehydrated foods such as beans, pastas, oatmeal, and rice, you have a distinct advantage: the dehydrated foods double or triple when cooked, so you use even less than a standard ½ cup measure to achieve the recommended ½ cup cooked serving.

When calculating the cost per serving of a food item (excluding meats), you divide the price by the number of servings obtained from that particular package. Simply buying the best available price per unit on any item isn’t enough—you have to know how much food this item will provide you once it is fully prepared for serving.

The object is to get the most servings for the least cost per serving.

To calculate cost per serving, find out how much constitutes one serving of that particular foodstuff, and how many servings that foodstuff will yield you. Divide the item’s price by the number of servings you will get out of it, and this will give you the cost per serving. With dehydrated foods, there is a big catch.

The catch to dehydrated foods: because you get two or three times the amount of food out if the item when it’s cooked, you need to calculate based on COOKED yield and not dry yield.

Example: let’s say you stumbled upon a display of brown rice. A 2-lb. bag costs $1.25, and you get 8 dry servings of ½ cup each from that bag, equaling .15625 (or .16) per dry serving. But we don’t eat dry rice, do we?

Since rice (at least) doubles, a single ½ cup dry serving will yield you 1 cup of cooked rice. In other words, that 2-lb. bag of rice actually yields you 16 servings of dry rice when used in ¼ cup measurements (which makes the recommended ½ cup serving per person).

Now you know the bag of rice will yield you 16 servings COOKED. As we do eat cooked rice, you can divide the price of the bag by 16 to get the cost per serving of COOKED, useable rice.

$1.25 divided by 16 = .078125 or .08 per serving of cooked brown rice

Now that you’ve learned how to calculate the cost per serving of foods other than meat, you can start making better buying decisions using less time and money to do it. With better portion control, your food will go even farther, allowing you to make fewer shopping trips and fewer calories get packed away for storage in your body.

Eating at home really DOES cost less than eating out when you stop to calculate your food costs per serving instead of per unit or per item. Many times, you will find that home cooking and careful purchasing yields many meals at $1.00/plate or less (excluding organic foods). You certainly can’t eat out for that price! As it turns out, Mom’s Diner (a.k.a. home) is the cheapest, most nutritious place on earth to eat.

Meat is a whole different story, and for that, I’ll gladly guide you to some expert help:

cheap cooking

Wegman's buying guide

VT extension office (scroll down until you see meat buying tips)

I’ll just leave you with some tips—the more bones, gristle, waste, and hollow carcasses the meat product contains, the more you pay per serving. Although boneless cuts seems expensive to you, they’re actually the best buy in the meat department because of their distinct lack of waste. Rubber Chicken and all of the offshoot recipes for lesser cuts and leftover carcass parts amounts to a lot of work to salvage a very little bit of meat, and you’d have to do it to help recoup the cost of that per serving price!

Another piece of advice: frozen whole birds have ice inside and throughout the carcass, making them weigh more at the register—why pay for ice when all you want is the meat? Buy fresh when you can.

Knowing this, you might want to start re-thinking holiday turkeys, holiday hams, and any other “tradition” meat that’s full of bones and/or has a hollow carcass. For an alternative, look into turkey thighs—more meat and less bone per person than a whole turkey, or even turkey legs.