Green with Children

Food Fight

It started out as one small article in The New York Times about the rising price of organic food. In my blog, I cast it as an enviable budgetary issue, considering how many people in the world can't afford any food at all.

Well, now if I had a dollar every time I saw a story about the rising price of food, I would have enough to buy a gallon of milk. Food is prohibitively expensive. Unlike the millions of other things I want in my life that are prohibitively expensive--cool designer sunglasses, a beach house in Menemsha, a butler--I honestly need the food.

A while back, our beautiful Green Guide founder Wendy Gordon suggested I track the cost of my groceries. I tallied up the receipts for the last several weeks. If I hadn't bought all this food, I think I could have bought the house in Martha's Vineyard.

By the way, it's easy for me to save my grocery receipts because they are all crunched in the bottom of the canvas bags I use every time I shop. Just like you, right? Has anyone else noticed the interesting phenomenon that you can gauge a lot about our society by the checkout person's reaction? Nonchalance? Must be a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's. Eye rolling and thinly veiled hostility? Must be my neighborhood mainstream supermarket. When the response to a motley bunch of reusable bags is routine nonchalance at every checkout aisle in America, we will have succeeded.

So my new campaign is to not spend our retirement on a week's worth of groceries. Here are some methods I've found useful: I have become an avid purveyor of the store specials, even letting them predict the menu. I'm also trying to discipline myself from going to Whole Foods. I am so happy at Whole Foods. I feel like a virtuous mom, a stylish shopper, a gourmet, a sophisticate. At Pathmark, where I now buy all our groceries, I feel like a harried middle-class housewife trying to stretch my dollar. Yes, it's no fun to shop this way, but it's working. The cashiers may not have heard that we use canvas bags, but the management clearly gets that we prefer organics. I'm finding major-league deals on organic fruits and vegetables. Organic meat is harder to find, but I don't don't use much.

I'm clearly not the only one doing dollar acrobatics. One day, an otherwise decent[-]looking man panhandled me in the produce department. He was wearing an apron and carrying a tray of chicken nuggets encased in Styrofoam and plastic wrap. I thought it was some weirdly unappealing taste test. Alas no, the gentleman was a few cents short to buy the nuggets (perhaps to eat on his break from the deli counter?) Hell, these days, I empathize. I gave him the money.

The truth is, a time will come when I too will don that apron and ask for some help in the organic milk aisle. If only my kids drank gasoline. It's so much cheaper.

© The Green Guide, 2008

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