One thing I realized now that my husband and I cook all our meals from scratch is the sheer amount of flour we use. We use it to bake breads, pies, etc. And since we will be living on very little money this year (for a variety of reasons), I plan on using locally grown/milled spelt flour and also plan on using regular all purpose flour because spelt flour costs $3.95 (IIRC) for a 2lb bag. That 2 lbs yields about 3 large pizzas. Which is economical pizza wise (if I compare it with the price of store bought pizza)…but then I have not been able to calculate the cost of our toppings per pizza which usually include mushrooms, cheese, tomatoes(or tomato sauce), and whatever else is suitable.

Anyway, the point of this post is flour. Not pizza.

I purchased 25 lbs of flour from King Arthur’s website. This purchase included shipping, and cost me $22.45. Shipping cost 6.95 and it will be shipped via USPS. Very rough calculations show me that the distance traveled from King Arthur’s base of Norwich, VT to me in Philadelphia, PA is 304 miles. So that is about $0.43/mile. No idea on how many gallons of gasoline were used to ship it to me. Since King Arthur is 100% owned by its employees I guess their employees are paid well. But I was curious on where the flour comes from. For some reason I found it a bit hard to imagine wheat growing in Vermont. So I emailed King Arthur’s customer service to find out where their grain was grown. Their response:

The wheat grown for King Arthur Flour is grown in a number of locations but not in Vermont. Most of the hard red winter wheat is grown in the Midwest; soft spring wheat is grown in the Southeast. We process both naturally grown wheat and organic wheat. http://www.kingarthurflour.com/flour/home.html

So first the wheat is grown in the midwest, then sent to Vermont, and then sent to me. I wonder if I could just buy the ground wheat from someone in the midwest. Or maybe I should get a grain grinder and buy the wheat from someone in the midwest.

There is no real point to this post, except when I originally started this post (a few weeks back), I wanted to do some sort of calculation on how much oil was spent getting flour from soil to my house. But I don’t know how to calculate that. I also wondered how I could be guaranteed that there wasn’t anything fishy about the grain in the flour (GMO, fish genes in the wheat, etc). But I will excuse this post because I am still sick, and when I am sick my thoughts are very rambly and pointless.