We're buying seed and flour.  Since I make all of our bread and it is still somewhat cost-effective (even with the King Arthur flours that I use), I bought a lot of it.  We'll see if, in six months, the price has risen more than 4 percent.

Basically, the idea is to invest cash in food now, and in six months that food will be worth X percent more...or rather, that food will save you X percent cash.

Add to that the food we're growing.  The US seems to have lost a lot of it's interest in vegetable gardens.  In my immediate neighborhood, there are four.  Granted, most of my neighbors think food comes in cardboard boxes or from a window in the side of a building, but the complete lack of any food being grown in the area is surprising.  The cost of getting started is a little high if you have to buy or supplement your soil, but the payoff over the long term is huge.  My vegetable bill every week is roughly $70 for two people.  Supplementing our vegetables with garden grown (including home canned or preserved veggies) will save me roughly 20 percent a week in the first growing cycle, and will eventually supply 90 percent of our vegetables.

Gardening isn't horribly difficult, but it takes time and isn't as fun as the numerous highspeed glassy diversions we're all into. It is hard on the back and knees.  The payoff is smaller than the input for a good while.  And when you do harvest, you may end up with too much zucchini, or too much soybean, and not enough peppers or etc.  So there's all this time you have to put in to learn the local tricks to balanced, healthy, hearty production. That costs time and some cash, but it puts you in touch with local gardeners and gets a network of support.

Almost every large metro / urban area has a community garden. Austin has quite a few.  Some are "open" gardens, where you get to plant whatever you want in a plot of land in exchange for helping with labor on the whole garden.  Some are "managed" plots (these terms are from a local community garden) that plant things the community or manager decides on and you supply labor and get a share of the harvest.

Urban vegetable gardening is the new White People Thing, getting to be very popular with suburban moms, young hipsters, yuppies, loft dwellers and the like.  You can purchase containers that range in size from a few feet to several hundred gallons that provide space for soil, drip irrigation, and rainwater collection.  You can make your own raised beds from simple boxes with cementboard or wood bottoms, a layer of gravel, sides made from 2 x 4 or 2 x 8 slats or fence planks, etc. Add a layer of weedblocker between the gravel and the soil...add organic soil...and then plant away.  I've seen plans for these beds that range from a square foot to 10 x 14 beds that hold quite a bit of food.  There are tons of plans out there for raised beds, all of them easy to create and maintain, and cheap.

Seeds are not too pricey, still, and can be purchased a season or two at a time. Local gardening groups, garden supply places, and community gardens provide great resources for what works when in your area.

There are a ton of books out there on beginning gardening.  I've purchased a couple, as well as a bunch of books on home arts.  Home economics.  Homesteading.  Old fashioned country homestyle living.  Things like, how to can and preserve food.  How to grow things, how to mend things, how to make things from scratch, how to maintain things.  Candle making, baking stuff, building stuff...basic information, stuff kids who grew up on farms or with folks who grew up on farms probably still know.  For instance, my grandparents until recently had a half acre of vegetable garden that they shared with my great-aunt.  They would harvest the veggies, and can the bulk of them, or dry what couldn't be canned.  We (as in, the family) had several cellars that contained shelf after shelf and row after row of canned food, enough to hold us over for years.

Well, maybe five years ago, they stopped gardening.  They're too old now to manage a garden daily.  They still buy in bulk and freeze or can what they buy at farmer's markets.  And the cellars are still about half full.

When I was younger, I couldn't understand why someone would go through all the trouble to save .59 cents on a can of peas.  Why anyone would work so damn hard to make food that could be purchased with less labor.  But I had never lived through a depression, or a war.  My grandparents first had a subsistence garden, then a victory garden, then a "just in case" garden, and eventually they had a luxury garden with a whole shedload of accidentally organic veggies. They did this to maintain their food stores without having to worry about the cost of food or the availability of it.  They did this because everyone in their generation and geographic location did; sometimes you couldn't find corn.  You couldn't buy rice.  You couldn't get whatever you wanted. The idea that food could be scarce...it was something they knew well.

And something I've never had to face.  But the reality is, food will be scarce.  It will be more expensive to buy. It is already scarce in the usual places, a dire condition that cannot be reversed easily.  The best way to deal with this is: make your own food.  There isn't anything stopping us, those few of us reading this, from doing so.  You can provide for yourself.

And, when possible, buy what you need in bulk.  This will help offset the rapid cost increases and the impact that has on your budget.