I have a batch of raspberry jam setting now. The batch is about six and a half jars, but two of them are big jars, and the other four and a half are small jars. The point is, that's multiple jars of jam.
The raspberries come from a volunteer raspberry bush that's been growing in my back yard for the past four years. The raspberries it produces aren't the best for eating fresh, but they cook down into a fabulous jam. This is the second year the bush has produced enough berries to make jam.
When the berries ripen, I spend about ten days to two weeks in the summer going out every day around 5 PM and picking all the berries that are ripe that day, and then I wash them and put them in freezer bags. When I have enough, I thaw them and make jam. There's some labor involved in actually going out and picking the raspberries, but it's not like I spend a lot of time actively tending the bush. It does its own thing for the other 350 days of the year.
Out of curiosity, I went on the Stop and Shop website to see how much I'd have to spend to get the same amount of berries in a grocery store. I ended up with about 40 ounces of raspberries fresh off the bush. Ye Olde Basicke Fresh Raspberries at the store sell for about $0.75/ounce so I'd have to spend $30 on berries to match my haul. But . . . I froze the berries that I picked. Frozen Stop and Shop raspberries sell for much less, $0.38/ounce. If I went with that option, I'd be spending $15.20 for the same 40 ounces of raspberries that I got for free by picking them from my own yard.
The other major ingredient in my raspberry jam is sugar. I use a 1:1 ratio of sugar to fruit by weight, so I'm looking at 40 ounces of sugar. Stop and Shop brand sugar is about $0.05/ounce, meaning that I used about $2 worth of sugar to make this jam. I also squoze in half a lemon, so add on 25 - 50 cents depending on whether the lemon is on sale or not.
Add that all together, and I've spent $2.50, tops, on this whole six-and-a-half-jar batch of jam. The raspberries are organic, too, in the sense that I don't use pesticides -- I barely touch them, and they're the next thing to wild. But, because they're neither the best eating quality nor specially, preciously organically farmed, I did the price comparison with the cheapest regular berries the store sells.
Still, that's $2.50 for a whole batch of pretty darn good raspberry jam. How much would I pay for raspberry jam at the Stop and Shop? Well, their store brand raspberry jam goes for $4.79 for one 18-ounce jar. Smuckers brand raspberry jam is $3.29 for a 20-ounce squeeze bottle and $5.29 for an 18-ounce jar. Bonne Maman, a higher-end and higher-quality brand, sells 13 ounces of jam for $6.99. And Crofter's Premium Organic Seedless Raspberry Fruit Spread commands $7.29 for 16 and a half ounces. (Admittedly, my jam has seeds. Quite a lot of them. But, really, what is good raspberry jam without seeds?)
If I really want to be persnickety, I have to use new canning lids every time I make a batch of jam, so that's an expense. They're about 30 cents each, so with seven lids, add $2.10 cents, bringing the batch up to $4.60.
Four dollars and sixty cents for six and a half jars of jam. The whole batch -- multiple jars, totaling much more than the 20 ounces in the Smuckers squeeze bottle -- is cheaper than all forms of raspberry jam sold at the Stop and Shop except that one 20-ounce squeeze bottle, and I will bet you the whole $1.31 difference that my jam is better quality than Smuckers squeeze-bottle jam.
My jam is freshly made, from just three ingredients. The fruit is, technically, organic, and very locally sourced. There are no artificial colors and no artificial preservatives -- admittedly, this is kind of the whole point of jam, to preserve fruit, but I didn't add commercial pectin to this recipe, because raspberries naturally have a lot of pectin.
I'd like to think that the difference in price between my homemade jam with free backyard raspberries goes to pay for the labor of farm workers growing and picking the berries and factory workers cooking and bottling the jam. Some of it does. Some of it also goes to pay for the marketing and the label design and all the new jars and bottling supplies that the jam factory uses -- I get to reuse my jars and bands to the point where they're basically free. But, of course, part of the price difference also goes to profit for the jam company shareholders.
All of which is to say . . . I don't know. I'm extremely lucky that a raspberry plant decided to grow in my back yard. I'm also glad that I know how to make jam, though that's a skill that's easy enough to acquire. And I did spend two weeks going out to pick berries every day, so I did save the cost of labor by doing that labor myself.
Why make my own jam? In this case, it does turn out to be cheaper than boughten jam -- the jams I make with boughten fruit probably pretty much break even -- but the value I get for the money I do spend is insane. Homemade jam is miles above the cheaper store brands, and it's really not hard to do. If you've got the time and resources (and you need much less of both of those things than you think you do) and you're looking for a project to produce both a tangible product and a personal sense of satisfaction, you really could do worse than learning to cook and can jam. Highly recommended!
