Grocery Shopping: The Return
Grocery shopping makes my sad and angry.
This is a damn shame, because food shopping is one of my greatest joys in life. I get five sale flyers delivered to my inbox every week, and read every one. I will rhapsodize to total strangers about the joys of fresh asparagus and strawberries ($1.99 and $1.81 at Kroger this week!). Well-stocked bulk bins make me squeal with delight.
And yet my shopping trip today made me want to weep. It is the fact that I checked every single brand of bread in Kroger today, and there was not a single whole or multi-grain loaf made without corn syrup or sugar in the first four ingredients. It is that at Food Lion I watched a grocery store employee throw nearly 50 pounds of oranges in the trash because they were slightly blemished. It was discovering a section--an entire section!--of an aisle labeled "milk additives." It was the absolutely heartbreaking sight of a women with two small children roll up to the checkout with a cart full of Doritos, soda, sugar cereals, Hamburger Helper, and looking forlornly out from the bottom of the cart, a box of Nutrigrain bars. She probably through them in there, thinking that the kids needed a healthy snack.
Too bad they are made with white flour and high-fructose corn syrup.
I makes me want to cry. It makes me want to go up to the woman and say "Pardon me ma'am, but are you aware that you are killing your children?" It makes we want to find food manufacturers and beat them over the head with their "Made with real fruit!" packaging until they realize that it doesn't count when fruit juice (from concentrate) is the 12th ingredient. For the first time two hundred years, life expectancy in the United States is actually decreasing, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
Really, I should just ban myself from ever entering a grocery store again. Between the farmer's market and Amazon.com, I could probably manage, as long as I get some else to bring me bananas.
On the plus side, I am now 2/3 through my mountain o'soup. Only the mushroom barley left!
This is a damn shame, because food shopping is one of my greatest joys in life. I get five sale flyers delivered to my inbox every week, and read every one. I will rhapsodize to total strangers about the joys of fresh asparagus and strawberries ($1.99 and $1.81 at Kroger this week!). Well-stocked bulk bins make me squeal with delight.
And yet my shopping trip today made me want to weep. It is the fact that I checked every single brand of bread in Kroger today, and there was not a single whole or multi-grain loaf made without corn syrup or sugar in the first four ingredients. It is that at Food Lion I watched a grocery store employee throw nearly 50 pounds of oranges in the trash because they were slightly blemished. It was discovering a section--an entire section!--of an aisle labeled "milk additives." It was the absolutely heartbreaking sight of a women with two small children roll up to the checkout with a cart full of Doritos, soda, sugar cereals, Hamburger Helper, and looking forlornly out from the bottom of the cart, a box of Nutrigrain bars. She probably through them in there, thinking that the kids needed a healthy snack.
Too bad they are made with white flour and high-fructose corn syrup.
I makes me want to cry. It makes me want to go up to the woman and say "Pardon me ma'am, but are you aware that you are killing your children?" It makes we want to find food manufacturers and beat them over the head with their "Made with real fruit!" packaging until they realize that it doesn't count when fruit juice (from concentrate) is the 12th ingredient. For the first time two hundred years, life expectancy in the United States is actually decreasing, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
Really, I should just ban myself from ever entering a grocery store again. Between the farmer's market and Amazon.com, I could probably manage, as long as I get some else to bring me bananas.
On the plus side, I am now 2/3 through my mountain o'soup. Only the mushroom barley left!