Eat your fruits and vegetables. Choose lean meats and fish. Limit your sugar and salt intake. We all hear these messages daily, and have for many years. There’s only one big problem: It costs money to eat right. That’s our observation, anyway.

We’re lucky to have fresh fruits and vegetables this time of year here in Maine, but they don’t come cheap.Many of us check out the prices and head for the frozen foods department. As for meats, it takes careful shopping to put a quality product on the table. If we had an option, we’d feast on seafood most of the time. However, if you’ve grown up on the coast where fresh fish meant directly from the boat’s fish hold to your hands at the dock, then you know nothing tastes quite like it. We can even remember the days when local fishermen gave you fish, or charged you very little. Those days are pretty much gone forever. We just have to be thankful that we can still buy fish that comes to us from all over the world.

More and more folks are growing their own vegetables on a small scale if they have the space, while farmers’ markets are crowded with shoppers seeking produce straight from the garden to them. We must say, though, we’ve been at quite a few of these where prices were, in our opinion, a mite high. Our grocery stores have to discard some of their vegetables and fruits when they’re no longer in A-1 condition, and our costs have to be factored into this waste.

Folks on limited food budgets, especially those with children to feed, struggle to plan meals which are nutritious as well as low-cost.

We all have to do the best we can to find foods we can afford that are also good for us. ‘taint easy.