Friday, October 17, 2008

A Fruitful Day


So this post is a long time coming - I actually started typing it up last Saturday and navigated away from the page by accident, so it all disappeared into cyberspace. Anyway, last Saturday, I did my two favorite Saturday type things - going to the Farmer's Market and to the used book store.


At the Farmer's Market I found gorgeous apples - Golden Delicious, Magnum Bonum, and Empires. Beautiful and so much better tasting than any genetically modified grocery store apple that's been shipped from Argentina. These were hanging on a tree in Virginia just a few days before I bought them. I also got some muskadine grapes from a cute older couple who were very sweet and let me sample both the muskadines and the scuppernongs ("scuppernines") to decide which ones I wanted. I rounded out my purches with some grass-fed ground beef, bacon, and "happy chicken" eggs. Beautiful, delicious, and much better for you than their conventional alternatives in the grocery store - and actually not that much more expensive. I know that food prices have gone up recently, but Americans still spend far less on their food purchases than any other developed nation in the world. And food is important! Much more important than cable and cell phones and movies and all the other "necessitities" that we willingly spend so much money on. I take it as a challenge to see how much good food for the least amount of money I can get, and I can usually be fairly successful. It largely depends on planning ahead. And, of course, I never do this perfectly. I hate having to throw food out because it went bad before we could get around to eating it, but sometimes it happens. It just means that I need to plan better so that we are wasting less.


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