Grocery Store Dilemma*

For the first time in about a month I finally went to the grocery store. Maybe it’s because my mom was in town and offered to buy my groceries, maybe it’s because regardless if she had offered to buy my groceries, my fridge was completely empty. I’ve been grappling with my feelings over the grocery store for some time now. I know they’re manipulative, I know they’re highly industrialized and I hate the fact that the bulk of what I’m buying is not local. For various other reasons I have stayed clear of the store—if anything shopping has become a real pain in the ass and no longer can I just waltz in and out to buy food. It now takes FOEVER!
Having not been to the store for a month I didn’t realize how out of hand my shopping excursions had gotten. First I wanted to know where my oranges were coming from (I found some from California). Then I wouldn’t buy the baby carrots because carrots don’t naturally look all perfect and peeled, which means they’ve been processed like crazy through God knows what weird machine. Then I wasn’t going to buy any meat because no one included a label where it had come from or how it was raised before it was slaughtered. My milk had to be Organic Valley because that’s the only one I knew of that grass fed their cows—but for a moment I contemplated going soy because I figured it was better for my body? Then I refused to buy eggs because I insisted I could find a farmers market with local eggs. As for my cereal selection, I caved and bought some Crispx—I figured I couldn’t be too picky and then came the peanut butter and jelly isle. Now before this class, I have never once in my life debated over what jelly to get. Okay that’s not entirely true: I don’t like jelly I actually prefer jam because I like the seeds. I don’t like strawberry because I don’t like the chunks of strawberry, but rather, I prefer a raspberry or a blackberry spread. See I’ve debated about this before. But the day I went with my mother to buy jam, it was an entirely different debate.
As I scanned over the various types of jam, the first thing I looked for was local jam. Where was all the Washington state jam? I know we grow berries! I found a jam was the produced and bottled in Oregon and figured that was close enough, EXCEPT when I checked out its ingredients, the second listed item was high fructose corn syrup. NO THANK YOU! So on my mission to go as local as possible, picking this particular jar would mean I’d be sacrificing my body and health. Thus I continued on my search and came across a jar that had a non-commercial like label—I spun it around and looked at the ingredients. BEHOLD a jar without HFCS! However it had made its way to this shelf all the way from New Jersey. The debate had officially begun: Do I, the consumer, go for the semi-local jam with the HFCS and support the lesser amount of oil/gas it took for it to get to my grocery store, OR do I go for the NJ jam without the HFCS, even though the amount of money it took to get to Washington was no doubt extremely high. Decisions, decisions.
In the end I chose the Oregon jam—not because it cost less to get to WA, but because per ounce there was more in it for the price than the competing HFCS free NJ jam. So there you go. After arguing back and forth about what jam would be better, the one with better ingredients or the one that cost less to ship, I ended up buying the one that had more for it’s money. After all I am a poor college student. The grocery store excursion ended then on a bittersweet note. I now realize why I haven’t visited it in such a long time… there’s just too many damn things to think about.
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