Grocery Shopping Made Easy
By: Keith
Those of us who live in industrialized nations are quite fortunate. Maybe a little too fortunate. As an illustration lets say we transported an average guy from 100 years ago into a modern grocery store. He would probably die of shock; but, lets say we let him do some shopping before his heart gave out on him. Where would he go? In that 50,000 square foot building how would he decide what to buy? No shopping list, no plan, only intuition. As modern people we might learn something about food and shopping. Keep in mind that 100 years ago the average family was strictly budgeted and accustomed to a completely different standard of living. I suspect we’d learn a little bit about need versus want. I’ve posed the question and, since we don’t really have a time traveler to follow around, I’ll answer the question. The goal is to feed a family nutritious food that is affordable (that’s what our guy from the past would want to do).
Shop the edges
Growing up healthy requires lots of vitamins, protein, carbohydrates, and minerals. Where in a grocery store can all that be found? The answer is in the produce, meats, dairy, and bread sections. All of those departments are found at the market’s outer edges. As a matter of fact, there is no reason at all to shop the middle of the store where all the processed and canned stuff is located. Food from around the edges is highly nutritious and cheap. It’s amazing how much of a markup there is on branded food. General Mills and Nabisco have huge advertising budgets and have to pass that cost to the customers. That means that customers are paying for something other than food, they are paying for image. Truly nutritious food costs money and these huge corporations are concerned mostly with their margins. They have to skimp on nutrition in order to increase margins. That’s the name of the game. The only way to control nutritional value is to buy foods that come directly from the ground or animal. Meat is just meat and veggies are just veggies. Pay for the food not the advertising.
Purchase only enough for a few days
The choice here is simple, shop every few days or waste massive amounts of money. There has been lots of research done on this subject and it’s an established fact that we are almost always fooled by advertising. It’s not even worth trying to save face on this by claiming it couldn’t possibly be true. It sadly is true. There is even a whole department at Cornell University dedicated to studying that very subject, “The Department of Consumer Behavior.” The only way to subvert the intense marketing in grocery stores is to get in and get out as quickly as possible. That means being able to buy food for a day or two without wasting time thinking about what we might want to eat a week down the road. That is how most people in the world shop anyway. I used to live in Mexico and one thing I found interesting was that every single day someone had to go to the market for food. But the interesting part was that there was almost no waste. Whatever was in the house was most likely going to be eaten within a few days. There was very little erroneous spending. It is wasteful to buy a weeks worth of food only to realize that half of it was unnecessary and will sit in the refrigerator or cupboard for weeks or months before eventually being tossed in the garbage.
Shopping really is easy if we keep a few basic principals in mind. The first is that our goal as parents concerning food is to get the most nutritious food into our families while spending as little money as possible. The second is no matter how smart we think we are we will fall prey to advertising if we are subjected to it for too long. All the nutrients our kids need come directly from an animal or out of the ground. It does not come from some company with a huge printing press. We should be spending most of our food budget on food rather than expensive marketing. Food should not be wasted and one easy way to protect against waste is to have a short term dietary plan. Projecting a meal plan out for a week or two weeks will only result is massive waste from either the food going bad or our realization that we purchased something we really didn’t want in the first place. Advertisers are sneaky. We are susceptible. And, our time traveling man is still walking around confused.
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If it comes in a box or package, it’s not as healthy. I like how the modern grocery store is organized like a trap, with endcap specials to lure you into the aisles. And once within the aisles, they arrange things at different heights– especially infant grab height.
I am amazed when going shopping– even in a “crappy” grocery store. To have raspberries in the middle of winter doesn’t give us appreciation for seasons, since it’s summer “somewhere” in the world and they can source the crops.
I saw a 95 cent half gallon tub of ice cream yesterday. You gotta wonder how they do that and what’s in it. Same for those 60 cent package of hot dogs at Walmart.