Taste Bud Training

I confess. Sometimes I push the envelope of frugality so far it crosses into tightwad territory. I’ve recently taken a detour down that particular avenue with outcomes that, as I explained to my wife Suzie, were “not uniformly aligned with projected benchmarks.” I’ve taken to calling it taste bud training.

I’m a creature of grocery habit, same brands, same shelf, barely a second thought. So when my usual spaghetti was out of stock, I found myself actually browsing the pasta aisle for once. That’s when I spotted the own-brand equivalent sitting there at 39 cents, next to the $2 packet I’d been buying without question for years. I took the plunge, and my spaghetti Bolognese tasted exactly the same.

That small victory got me hooked on intentional own-brand switching. Own-brand butter, cornflakes, slightly wonky-looking fruit and vegetables all tasted fine, and the savings started rolling in. Dollars cheaper per shop. I may have mentioned it to Suzie on more than one occasion, the smugness was considerable.

Naturally, I decided to step it up a notch. On my next visit I went out on a limb: own-brand porridge, balsamic vinegar, olive oil that came in $70 cheaper than my usual bottle, an XL bag of dry roasted peanuts, and a bottle of merlot from the basics wine range. Over $90 saved on a single basket of goods. Wonderful.

Then the taste bud training kicked in, hard. The porridge was “different”, and I’m being charitable with that word. The olive oil didn’t make the grade. The balsamic vinegar was sharp and deeply unpleasant.

I consoled myself with a handful of dry roasted peanuts and a glass of wine. The nuts were small, oddly flavoured, and missing the satisfying crunch of my usual brand. As for the wine, it was a revelation. Not a good revelation, I should add.

But I stuck at it. I’d bought the stuff and was determined to use it, convinced I could train my taste buds to accept their new reality. My wife Suzie had no such delusions. She went back to the shop and repurchased the original brands for her own peace of mind.

I held my ground. Partially. The wine got consumed, grimly but consumed. My porridge bowl became a 50:50 blend of own-brand and Suzie’s superior repurchase, a compromise my taste buds refused to call a win.

No matter how I persevered, they flatly declined to stop being snobs about it. The XL bag of peanuts was binned. The olive oil was demoted to cooking duties only. The balsamic vinegar sits at the back of the cupboard, behind the normal bottle, in a kind of condiment exile.

The experiment wasn’t a total write-off. The own-brand staples that passed the taste test have stayed in the trolley, and those savings are real and recurring. What I discovered is that frugality works best when you’re honest about your limits. Mine apparently include a non-negotiable position on balsamic vinegar and a baseline wine standard that rules out anything with a cartoon on the label.

The $90 saved looked magnificent on paper and cost me considerably more in domestic goodwill, binned peanuts and six weeks of porridge that tasted of regret. Sometimes the cheap option is the expensive lesson. A smarter man might have figured that out before buying an XL bag of anything from a basics range. Suzie, who is married to me and therefore had reasonable advance warning of how this would go, has been gracious enough not to mention it.