Times are hard, and the prices for everything continue to go up. If you’re like me, it’s with food that you feel the crunch most keenly. There’s nothing sadder than having to refuse a second slice of pie, or pass on dessert altogether, simply because you can’t afford it. To help you stretch that last peso (so you can eat a bit more dessert), you might want to consider dropping the following food items from your grocery list.

5. Pre-Cut Produce 

What It Is:

These are fruits and vegetables that have been washed, peeled, cut, and packaged into individual Styrofoam trays that you can find in the grocery’s produce section. They’re priced depending on the weight of the fruits the packaging dude stuffed under the cling wrap cover. Fancy grocers sometimes take it up a notch by putting multiple kinds of produce together and giving it a fancy name, like “Chef’s Choice Salad” or “Daily Greens.”

Why You Buy It:

Convenience is hard to beat. These little bundles require neither washing, peeling, and cutting, nor the clean up that follows said prep work. You can simply plop their contents into a pan and get on with it. Add a camera and a catch phrase and you’ve got your own cooking show, just like the ones on TV.

Pre-cut produce is more expensive than its unprocessed counterparts and if there’s anything that society has conditioned us to think, it’s that higher prices equal better quality.

Why You Shouldn’t:

I hate to break it to you but the fruits and vegetables that grocery stores cut up and repackage are never as good as the fresh ones on sale. Stores would never mutilate fresh, quality produce. Slicing them up is often a last ditch attempt to move inventory that’s near the end of its sellable shelf life. Would you really want to pay more for subpar merchandise?

So just practice your knife skills until chopping up lettuce or slicing mangoes stops being a hassle. Trust me, your wallet (and your stomach) will thank you for it.

4. Anything at the Movie Theater Snack Bar

What It Is:

We all know that the movie theater’s snack bar stocks anything you might crave while watching Jason Statham kick things, or Ryan Gosling pretty it up on the big screen. We’re talking about the plethora of foil-wrapped finger food and maybe even some dim sum.

Why You Buy It:

It’s expected. Going to the movies isn’t the same without a big tub of popcorn and a plastic cup of soda lodged in your armrest’s cup holder. So what if the fake powdered cheese gets all over your hands and clothes, or that you end up missing the best part because you had to run to the comfort run from drinking too much soda?

Why You Shouldn’t:

Snack bar food is horribly overpriced because they’re the principal source of income for most movie theaters. They don’t profit that much from selling movie tickets (the film producers are the ones that make a killing on those) so they try to make up their losses through candy bars that cost you an arm and a leg. When you think about it, the movies are really just elaborate bait designed to make you buy a bag of Doritos on your way in.

Now, I’m not telling you to skip out on snacks when you watch the next “Avengers” movie. Just veer away from the snack bar, and make a beeline for the grocery instead. Movie theaters are usually located in malls with grocery stores that have a wider (and cheaper) assortment of munchies and drinks. Ditch the stale, nuclear orange popcorn and get a large bucket of Chef Tony’s gourmet stuff instead. Also, walking from the theater to the grocery and back should offset, even by the tiniest bit, the caloric consequences of stuffing your face while sitting still in front of a flickering screen for the next two hours.

3. Olive Oil

What It Is:

It’s the pale green nectar of the culinary gods. Rendered from pressed olives, olive oil is the sexiest kind of fat there is. They even categorize the stuff under names like virgin and extra-virgin. It’s good for the heart, it’s good for the skin, and it’s really really good on, in, rubbed around, or drizzled over food.

Why You Buy It:

Jamie Oliver and his fellow celebrity chefs frequently extol the virtues of olive oil and use gallons of the stuff on their cooking shows. Culinary star power aside, almost every chef in the world is partial to olive oil for its versatility in the kitchen. The only catch is that you can’t use olive oil for deep-frying due to its low smoking point; it breaks easily over prolonged high heat compared to other oils.

Olive oil is often marketed very similarly to wines. There’s a wide assortment available for purchase, differentiated by price and (perceived) quality. The best and most expensive ones come in long, beautifully sculpted bottles, and a lineage so fancy, they should wear a monocle. All others, from the slightly pricey to cheap ones (with questionable expiry dates), have only the most minor of variations between them, regardless of how one brand sounds more Italian than the other.

Why You Shouldn’t:

I don’t want to be inundated with complaints about how I’m a poor cheapskate who wouldn’t recognize quality food if it was right under my nose (hopefully, in that scenario, the food would be sponsored, but I digress). So, let me just state that genuinely good olive oil is worth the high price tag. They taste better, last longer, and are sold in prettier bottles that you can reuse or put on display. If you can afford it, then go bathe in the stuff.  It’s the mid-tier products that I am wary of.

Here’s a fun fact: lower grade olive oil is virtually identical to those that are marked as slightly better. Despite being practically the same, their prices can vary by half or more. That’s money better spent elsewhere.

Remember what I said about equating higher prices to better quality? In this case it applies because the pricey stuff is the real thing. It’s hard to say that about the cheaper kinds. Also, olive oil is a multi-billion dollar industry for the Italian mob. Experts say that as much as 70% of olive oil sold worldwide has been compromised with cheaper and less sexy extenders like soybean or sunflower oil. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not, that fancy bottle in your grocery cart probably contains nothing more than green-tinted canola oil. Sorry.

2. Powdered Health Shakes

What It Is:

They’re food supplements in powdered form that you can mix with liquid for easy consumption. They have mixes for things like fat loss, muscle building, and athletic recovery. They also come in flavors like chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. The powder mixes taste okay; if not particularly appetizing, as it’s hard to mess up basic flavors. Every once in a while, though, a company gets too ambitious and tries to recreate the taste of rocky road ice cream or lemon meringue and horror predictably ensues.

Health shakes are usually seen in little plastic tumblers toted by people decked out in brand new fitness gear at the gym, who swear that this year is their year, though you will never see them again after the first week.

Why You Buy It:

You think it’s magic. This is especially prevalent in guys who believe that a whey shake will, through some arcane sorcery, turn them into Thor after a month at the squat rack. Women aren’t immune to this either. I’ve known many who insist that a protein smoothie, coupled with a twenty-minute walk on the treadmill, does wonders for their fat loss goals. Such misinformation is potentially harmful, not only to their self-esteem after the physical results they want fail to materialize, but also to their wallet. A tub of protein shake can easily cost thousands of pesos.

Why You Shouldn’t:

It’s just food. There’s nothing magical about it. While there isn’t anything intrinsically harmful about consuming a protein or meal replacement shake, you shouldn’t pay so much for a mere vehicle used to meet caloric and macronutrient goals.

For the guys who are competing with their girlfriends’ Team Jacob obsession, I’ve got your back. If possible, break up with your girlfriend. Seriously, it’s 2013 and she’s still hooked on Taylor Lautner? You’re better off without her. If that option’s not doable, combining milk, oats, peanut butter, and a banana or two in a blender will work just as well as that expensive sack of mass-gainer you bought. Is that still too complicated for you? Just drink chocolate milk then. It’s tasty, relatively cheap, and high in both calories and protein.  If you’re trying to lose a few pounds, substitute skim (not non-fat) milk for whole milk. Its caloric content is much lower, but it’s still high in protein.

1. Designer Coffee

What It Is:

I’m not talking about the kopi luwak (the rare, expensive coffee made from exotic mammal poop) that your cool uncle grinds himself and brews into a thick black potion so fantastic it should be illegal. That stuff is awesome.

I’m referring to something more common, the sort that requires a barista to make and is prefaced with adjectives that make it sound more like a smoothie than coffee.

Why You Buy It:

It’s very tasty, and you need to order it to justify leeching off the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi and leaving your laptop plugged into their power sockets for the next six hours. Besides, it’s not like you can drink your coffee black, you’re not your dad.

Why You Shouldn’t:

Yes, it’s tasty. But it’s also overpriced. It’s not really coffee either, not really. There’s nothing in that tall plastic cup that’s worth two hundred pesos, not the miniscule squirts of soy milk or the artificial caramel syrup that you can barely taste.

So why is it so expensive? Coffee shops are trendy, and the upscale ones have an aspirational quality. Just like with any other kind of branded merchandise, you’re not paying as much for the actual product than for the bragging rights that come with enjoying it. If it’s the taste you’re after, there are plenty of ways to get that rich flavor without the inflated price tag. We folks here at Pepper.ph can even show you how to make “Starbucks” coffee using a cheap sachet of 3-in-1.

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Hopefully, if you follow all the tips we’ve given you in this article, you’d never have to suffer through the despair of saying no to more pie. Not even your worst enemy deserves that.

[photos via gettyimages]