When I was in college, finding a good buy at the grocery store meant anything cheap or on sale. (When my grandparents sent me birthday money, I used it to upgrade my food purchases.)
Being a grown up with stable finances has a lot of benefits, and food is one of the biggest ones. I love that a “good buy” now means something a lot more to me than price. I feel extremely privileged that I’m able to buy the foods I do, and I have the time and resources to learn about why the type of food I buy is so important.
I also feel a little stressed out sometimes, because my qualifications for what food is “good” sky-rocket with every documentary I watch.
Ten years ago I would have said that good food is: inexpensive, tasty, convenient, and preferably has a long shelf life. (I was living in a dorm with a communal kitchen down the hall and had a limited budget.)
How I Define “Good Food” Now: Healthy, and tasty with a limited impact on the environment.
Good for my body means it’s fresh, plant-based, minimally processed, non-GMO, and organic, with minimal refined grains or added sugars.
Good for the environment means it was grown locally, it’s organic, and it’s minimally packaged.
Tasty means it’s not wax beans or lima beans, and honestly I know Greg loves beets but they’re not my favorite.
This means I can buy:
Local organic lettuce that is sold without packaging. And actually this is questionable since it will only TASTE good with the addition of other things (ie, in a smoothie, because salads are kind of my nemesis).
Much of the available produce is either local or organic. Some organic produce is wrapped in plastic, while its conventional counterpart isn’t (the cauliflower at Whole Foods comes to mind). I can buy peanuts in bulk and avoid the packaging, but they’re not organic – those come in a plastic bag.
My favorite sprouted grain, flourless, super healthy Ezekiel English Muffins? In cardboard surrounded by a plastic bag, produced in a factory across the country and shipped to the store. Shoot.
Time to start making my own… or is it?
Two out of three ain’t bad:
I need to feed my family with as little guilt as possible, so I’ve started choosing foods with these guidelines in mind to help me prioritize my food choices, but not bind myself to them. I choose the least amount of packaging whenever bulk is an option. I choose organic whenever possible. I buy local when I see it. For the dirty dozen, I buy organic over local. I never buy animal products. I buy the recyclable, BPA free boxes of tomatoes instead of the canned tomatoes with BPA linings. I make the best choices I can, and hope that better ones will be available in the future whenever I feel guilty for chucking non-organic clementines from Chile into my cart because I love them so much.
I don’t wish I could go back in time to the oblivious me in college, although sometimes things were easier, back then. Instead I try to appreciate how lucky I am to have the amount of control I do over what I feed my family. I live close to a large Whole Foods, there are farmer’s markets nearby every Saturday, and I can afford to buy organic. Buying in bulk and avoiding animal products actually reduced our grocery bill, but buying organic is more expensive. I think of it as an investment in our health and the environment that I’m lucky we can make.
The other day I spent over an hour taking the skins off chick peas so I could make myself some guilt free homemade hummus. It eliminated the plastic container of store-bought hummus and the cans of chickpeas, but soaking the chickpeas, cooking them, taking the skins off, and then blending my own hummus was over an hour of active labor. That’s just not going to work for our family right now.
So I’m taking some deep breaths, making the best choices I can that actually work for our family, and trying to feel good about the choices I make. Even when they’re not local organic package-free lettuce.
What does “good” food look like to you?