S and I have begun buying all our milk at Whole Foods; we're buying the store's brand of organic 2% milk. I have a hard time justifying the purchase, other than it makes me feel good to do so. If I had a lot more money, I'd exclusively buy organic meat and eggs too. Lately, when I've been buying chicken, I've been buying organic chicken from the grocery store (not WF). It's hard to draw the line for me--how do I choose which expensive organic foods to eat? Vegetables, if they were only a little cheaper, I would buy. But I simply can't afford to buy organic vegetables--I eat too much vegetable product during any given week. And I eat in restaurants on average once a week--I know I'm not getting organic, non-modified food at most restaurants. But personally, I enjoy eating out, and with the diet thing, eating out has become my release--if I didn't, I wouldn't survive the diet. So how did we decide to change exclusively to organic milk?
I'm not really sure, except that we really like going to WF. If we could do all our shopping at WF, we probably would. I'm sure that we'd still have things we would buy at the conventional grocery store--frozen pizzas for him, healthy choice soups for me--but I think we'd both like to have more money to spend at WF. (And neither of us love Trader Joe's. We've found several isolated items that we love from TJ, but we could never do our weekly shopping there.) Sometimes we see people with 10 to 15 paper bags coming out of WF (today, people with that many bags walked to a Hummer. What's the damn point of shopping at a natural food store and driving a damn Hum-vee? Seems a trifle oxymoronic.), and both of us have a sense of longing for those carts. But we cannot spend 15o dollars a week on groceries. We try to stay around 75 a week, which for two people, isn't so bad. We spend about 20 a week at WF, and since we're not exactly eating out at fine dining establishments, I'd say that in any given week, we're spending about 120 dollars on food. (And that grocery bill includes all of our cleaning supplies. Tide week is obviously more expensive than others; TP, tissues and Drano tend to push the bill up as well.) We could never eat for a week for 70 dollars at WF.
We each have our things too, that we get at WF. We go every Sunday, now, to replace the milk and pick up those other staples of our diets. I love WF's low-fat blueberry muffins. They're unbelievable. The pineapple at WF is actually cheaper than at the grocery store, and I do pick up produce specials at WF; my most recent was asparagus. I also try to pick up a bag of Stacy's Pita Chips, which are absolutely delicious. If I had more money and less diet, I'd buy cheese all the time at WF--their selection of international cheeses can't be beat. I do buy spreadable goat cheese there about once a month. S loves the Bolton Farm smoothies--and since it's really the only vegetables S puts in his body, I tolerate the expense. S also always buys at least one bar of Green and Black's organic chocolate; he discovered the brand in England, where it's sold in every corner shop and grocery store. Lately, S has been buying chocolate chip cookies from the bakery at WF. I guess they're good, but I have never had one. The only other thing that we will henceforth be buying only at WF is beef broth. I have a recipe for French Dip that calls for it, and we've tried most grocery store brands, but we recently tried one of the WF brands, and the French Dip was amazing. So good. So we've switching to WF beef broth.
This list would go on forever if we'd let it, you know. But we try to go in WF after a meal, and with very specific needs. It seems to help. I always say that if I had an unlimited amount of money I'd buy designer clothes and shoes and such, but really, I'd just be in WF twice a week buying food.
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