Unstuck: Vancouver woman has concocted winning recipe for sustainable living

Monique Dupre can feed her family of four on $65 a week.

The 29-year-old stay-at-home mom doesn’t chase sales or clip coupons. You won’t find boxes of cereal, crackers or Hamburger Helper in the kitchen of her downtown Vancouver home.

Her pantry is stocked with glass jars of whole grains, beans, spices, as well as organic and local produce, meat and dairy. She grinds her own flour, makes her own condiments, bakes her own bread and cultures her own dairy products.

“People say to me, ‘You must spend so much time in the kitchen,’ ” Dupre said. She counters, “You must spend a lot of time in your car going to grocery stores.”

In this time of rapidly rising food prices, the two to three classes a week Dupre teaches on how to spend less while still eating healthful, local, organic foods are booked out months in advance.

Her routine gives a glimpse into her methods. She grows vegetables on her 5,200-square foot Vancouver lot, and supplements what she produces with a subscription to a community supported agriculture farm. She buys meat directly from farms and has it processed by a Portland butcher. She gets her milk from Dee Creek Farm in Woodland. She orders staples from Azure Standard, a warehouse in Dufur, Ore., that trucks natural foods to drop points around the region.

“We don’t eat anything in plastic coffins — what I call packaged food,” Dupre said.

On a recent spring day, the family ate rye berries with pumpkin seeds and raisins for breakfast, spinach salad and an omelet made with eggs from backyard chickens for lunch, and minestrone for dinner.

When she chooses, Dupre makes a trip to New Seasons in Portland to buy fresh fish or specialty cheeses. But she realized last August that the grocery store was no longer necessary. When she shared this milestone with friends in on an online group, so many of them wanted to know how she went about it that she started a series of classes called “Sustainable Living on a Budget.”

“This is so much more than saving money,” Dupre said. “This is literally saving lives.”

In her classes, Dupre teaches how to plan meals, as well as prepare homemade dairy products, whole grains, fermented foods and condiments.

She relies on age-old cooking methods of the sort outlined in Sally Fallon’s book “Nourishing Traditions,” which argues against fads diets and for whole foods.

Dupre’s message challenges the way most families feed themselves, but she stresses that it is possible to make the changes she outlines in her classes.

“I did not grow up with a mother who did any of this,” Dupre said.

Dupre said her mother’s cooking consisted of “a can of this and a can of that,” although other aspects of her childhood inform her passions today. She grew up on a farm near Astoria, Ore., that was powered by solar electricity and supplied by gravity-fed water. At the time, she couldn’t wait to get out of the country and into the city. She went to college at Portland State University to study anthropology, and then traveled through Europe by herself.

She met her husband, Anthony, in his native France. She brought him back to the United States with her, and saw things through the eyes of a newcomer. She cringed at the pervasive consumerism.

The birth of her daughters, Cèlia, 6, and Solenne, 3, further raised her concerns about lifestyle and nutrition.

“I don’t want them to be city kids who have no idea where food comes from,” Dupre said. “I don’t know of anything more important than nourishing myself and my family in a healthy way.”

In her introductory class, she cautions her students: “I don’t recommend jumping in and doing it all at once.”

Ultimately, though, she said bringing the food budget down requires eliminating processed food, which provides health benefits, too.

“What you consume,” she said, “becomes a part of you.”