Rebecca Weger

A friend of mine once shared her perspective that one of the ways we humans can be authentic, ethical and in right relationship with each other and the planet is to accept our own hypocrisy. I try to practice this sense of paying attention to my choices and noticing that my choices are complex and often they come from imperfect options. In no place does this hit harder for me than in choices about what I buy to eat.

I’ve gotten to show off a couple of gorgeous photos of the wonderful local food we buy at the farmer’s market, but of course we eat other food. So how to decide what to buy?

Price is certainly an issue – we have a fairly set food budget – but we value lots of things that have higher prices because the cost to the environment or our sense of ethics is lower. Some things we consider:

• It is local?
• Is it organic?
• Is it ethical?
• If there is an animal involved, what do I know about its care and life?
• Is it free of allergens (I follow a strict gluten-free diet)?
• Is there limited packaging?
• Can the packaging be recycled?

There are a number of guidelines for me that result from this line of questioning.    Here’s a simple example.  I struggle about what I eat for carbohydrates.  I eat a lot of rice, which is not local to central NY.  Most rice options are imported from Asia.  Lundberg Family Farms, however, grows and processes all its rice in California.  That’s about as local as I can get for something that is pretty standard fare on a gluten-free diet.  I buy it from the bulk section at the coop where I can take my own container and eliminate any packaging.

So in my world of imperfect choices, here’s a look at what I bought at the store tonight:

Groceries: 6.21.2009 $65

The gluten-free bread was made by the coop bakery here in town.  Organic Valley is my commerical organic brand of choice for butter and milk.  It is a cooperative of family farms, some of which are in my area.  The avocados are organic and from California (not Mexico).  They are a serious weakness of mine and on the short list of foods I buy with some regularity that don’t fit a lot of my other parameters.  Three kinds of organic rice and organic red quinoa.  That quinoa and the Jarlsberg cheese are two of the items I’m sure came from outside the US.  The box holding the organic vanilla, organic granola (for Joseph), and the potato starch flour (one of my flour necessities) contains three blocks of local tofu.  The walnuts are conventional, the cinnamon is organic.  I know little about all the details of the cat food.  I picked it two years ago and stuck with it.

It certainly doesn’t look like a lot of food for $65, but that’s one of the areas we’ve chosen to pour our money into our values – as hypocritical as they sometimes are.  What do you think about in the grocery store?