Think Kit Dec. 2 - Polling my People on Their Grocery Shopping Habits

image via www.kimberlysnyder.net

Day two and I'm prompted to conduct a poll.  So, I asked my friends online:

When you grocery shop, what foods' labels do you look at the most? What do you look for?

I'm a self-made food systems aficionado.  American health and wellness is a vast, complex system of cultural, economic, and physiological variables.  I'm not academically trained in the field but I do like to read and write about it. It's all very fascinating to me.  One such aspect is how we negotiate what makes it into our shopping carts when we're at the grocery.  I fully realize that the sample of people in this very unofficial poll  is not geographically nor socioeconomically diverse. But that's not necessarily a bad thing in this particular conversation.  What I wanted to know was what information the savvy grocery shoppers in my life prioritized while in the aisle. The response was great! Thirty of my friends responded throughout the course of the day on Facebook and here's what they had to say.

Items examined included packaged/processed foods, yogurt, frozen food, and cereal.


What was examined in my respondents included:

Criteria                                           Number of references
Sodium..........................................................11
Sugar.............................................................7
Calories.........................................................7
The first 3 ingredients listed..........................6
Organic.........................................................6
Non-GMO....................................................4
Ingredients you can pronounce.....................3
Carbs.............................................................2
Aspartame.....................................................2
Fiber..............................................................2
Fat.................................................................2
Price..............................................................2
Dyes..............................................................1
High Fructose Corn Syrup............................1


Regarding the specific findings, I was not surprised to see processed foods and cereal mentioned as much as they were.  I did think it was interesting to see sodium rank where it did and high fructose corn syrup so low.  It was also interesting to see GMO food land where it did.

Someone did mention that they were 'quick shoppers'.  I think many of us are, whether we realize it or not.  Perhaps that's why both 'ingredients you can pronounce' and 'the first three ingredients' were common criteria mentioned.  The former, I suppose, is meant to exclude aspartame, galactose, and butylated hydroxyanisole from your cart.  The latter as ingredients are listed in order of the percentage content of the item. I have read that those two perspectives make for somewhat reliable rules if you're in a hurry.

Again, thanks to those who responded!

The Unintended Consequences of Backyard Vegetable Gardening

If you follow us online, you know that we like to garden on our rather tiny property here in Indianapolis.  We've got a strawberry patch that is now in full swing.  We plant a variety of leafy greens, squash, tomatoes, onions, turnips and so on.  We've had chickens for a few years now.  It's been a wonderful exercise for our family.  It helps ensure that our kids won't think that their food is grown on the sun or in a grocery store. Yes, these are responses uttered by city youth attending a food and fitness camp that I was associated with this time last summer. The garden is an invaluable teaching mechanism for these  city kids of ours and a meditative act for parents who both probably belong on a secluded, wooded farm.  But substantively reducing our grocery bill it does not. 

Strawberries and eggs from the yard

Once the feel good times around seeing a tomato ripen or pulling an egg from a nesting box are over, growing a little bit of your own food can really be pretty depressing. If you are an urbanite that thinks about what it would be like if you had to grow your own food in an act of independence or out of necessity, you're going to have a bad time.  It really makes you appreciate the system of producers and distribution in place to ensure access to food, including fresh produce, meats, dairy, and inexpensive food products.  I'm not trying to justify "big food", that comes in a later post.  What I do appreciate is the scale with which our food system feeds our ever expanding population.  It's a critical aspect of food production foodists and organic aficionados sometimes marginalize, in my opinion.  Reform is necessary and it should be practical.

Vegetable gardening forces me to think about the scale of food production that would be needed to feed a substantial community.  In my mind if we want significant change, that is a large swath of the populace eating a sizable amount of healthy food for a significant length of the year, we've got a long way to go. Vegetable gardening makes a poignant statement about the need for more organic farmers, assuming the demand is there.  Despite the fact that our garden/yard really only feeds us a fraction of what we eat, we'll still continue to garden and enjoy what we produce and the experience around it.