First Shopping Trip

The first shopping trip post proud-of-my-plate resolution found me in our neighborhood health food store - The Turnip Truck. Previously my budget did not allow for me to do extensive shopping there, but now the quest to make it work begins...

Along with my bags of produce and my three month old, I walked away with two thoughts and a question:

First of all, I noticed that not all organic food is that much more expensive than non-organic. Celery, for example, was only ten to fifteen cents more than I would have paid at Kroger. It seems then that organic food isn't exorbitant if:

A) You buy mostly produce versus packaged products.
and
B) Said produce is in season.

I bought organic veggies including sweet potatoes, onions, fresh ginger and lettuce and none of it broke the bank.

What could break the bank is going wild in the dairy section. $4.00 for milk(!), $5.00 for cottage cheese(!!) and $6.00 for stick butter(!!!) means I won't only be cutting back on the meat I buy but the animal products as well.

Musing over the four sticks of butter in my bag that cost three times as much as I normally pay, I realized that my value of this product has likewise increased threefold and therefore my consumption of it will decrease in proportion. This means then that unless it is a very special occasion, I will forgo making those chocolate cookies that call for three(!) sticks of butter because this butter is now the gold currency of my kitchen. And that's a good thing, right? I mean, who needs anything with three sticks of butter in it anyway?!

Butter is one of those things that used to be treated like gold by everyone, but since it has been made so cheaply and readily available it has been devalued. I remember reading the Little House on The Prairie books when I was a kid and marveling over how hard they had to work to make things like butter.

So here's the second thought: Buying organic products will help me respect the effort it takes to create this kind of prepared food and will not only benefit the health of the animals it comes from, but my own body as well. (Because...the only way to turn when you've stepped away from meat and animal products is toward vegetables and grains, and who couldn't benefit from more of that heart healthy, all around great for you stuff?!)

Finally, I was excited to see "Local" labels calling attention to, you guessed it, locally grown or prepared food. The thing is though, none of the local items I looked at were organic. So the question is, which is the better choice: Local or Organic? I want to do some research and see what I can find out that might help me decide. But for now, I think I will buy whichever one is cheaper and remember that the point is I am thinking about where my food comes from and that either choice is certainly something to be proud of.