wrote in message
...

Right. You could get them from a farmer at the going rate of about
$1.25 per bushel (8 gallons). Most likely if you showed up at the
right time with bags, you could get enough oats to last several years
for $5. Back in Indiana I lived in a rural area that raised a lot of
popcorn. There you just asked the farmer if you could glean some after
the picker went through. They would all let you. What you did was go
to the corners where the combine makes a turn and knocks over the corn
instead of harvesting it. I never bought popcorn. I also never bought
field corn for the same reason and fed 4 goats the corn, plus other
stuff of course. Like I said, the price of oats is almost all
marketing and middle men. Anyway, I have 8 packages of steel cut oats
(17 servings each pkg.) on hand and 3 boxes of the cheapo WalMart
rolled oats each with 30 servings, so I won't be needing any for a
while. The Walmart rolled oats sell for 1.92 per box which is .06 per
serving. Steel cuts are still very cheap, although about about 3X that
much if you buy any of the brand names...more for organic. I have to
laugh when people talk about how expensive it is to eat a vegetarian
diet. Like anything else, you can pay for food or you can pay for
hype, marketing, specialty brands, or exotic foods, but the standard
vegetarian fare is not at all expensive.

The hype doesn't stop with human food either. I notice the expensive
samples of dog food I get at a local pet store uses oats with the
claim that most other dog foods do not contain oats because they are
so expensive. Ha. dkw

I'm in NYC so there are no local farms for me to buy oats or other food from
directly. There's also no WalMart. I can get steel cut oats from the
health food stores for about $1-$1.30/pound. Sure, they're cheaper out
there somewhere but for NYC that's a good deal, and much cheaper than buying
the fancy tin of McCann's Irish Oatmeal. Since I don't buy rolled oats
often I'm not sure what they cost but they're usually cheaper than steel
cut, which is odd. I think the rolled oats, at least the instant & quick
cooking (the stuff that cooks in about 5 minutes) are partially
cooked/steamed before they're rolled, which is why you can prepare them
quickly in the morning for breakfast. Seems like more steps are involved in
making rolled oats and those should cost more.

When you buy stuff in the supermarket you're also pay a whole lot of money
for packaging. The McCann's steel cut oats that come in a fancy tin are no
different than the oats in the bulk bin or a cardboard box, but the stuff in
the tin costs about $6 here. You can get a whole lot of aots in a plastic
bag at the health food store for that same $6, and put it in your own tin at
home. I store all of my bulk items in Lock & Lock boxes. Nothing has ever
spoiled in those.

--
Liz