Grocery Shopping with Elle

by Craig Welch

I wonder how many families around the world shop for their food once a week? That’s the ritual for our family and I think for just about everyone else I know. This is likely an American phenomenon created by credit cards, suburban planning and our work-life “balance”. I think that most of the world buys their food daily, or at least many times per week from neighborhood grocery stores, butchers, fruit and vegetable stands and bakeries. In other places, I imagine that the food is fresh, in season, has little or no need for preservatives and can be carried home in one bag. Like it or not, my family practices the American style of shopping. I try to stop at Carl’s Meat Market to stock up on the Bell & Evan’s natural chicken tenders and at Golden Harvest because their fruits and veggies are better quality and I like to support the local guy. Mostly, our shopping is a $250.00 trip per week military industrial exercise requiring lists, bags full of bags, an SUV, a credit card and if all goes well, at least one of our four children.

This week it was Elle’s turn. These trips present an opportunity to talk with each child a little about where our food comes from – well lit refrigerated cases wrapped in plastic? How to make good consumer choices – Spider-man gummies for $7.24 per pound or Golden Delicious apples at $1.29 per pound? Ultimately, they are learning how to make healthy choices to best fuel our bodies.

Having Elle along makes me realize not only how hard it is to make healthy choices about food, but also how hard it is to figure out what items in the store are really food at all. It’s one thing to try to make good choices from our fridge or pantry, but entirely another thing to make choices from a 75,000 sq.ft. box store full of colorful bags, boxes and bottles of chemistry posing as food. Even in our mostly utilitarian local Market Basket, the splash of color, bright lights and piped in music could be mistaken for a carnival.

As Elle and I start out, we remind ourselves of the rule about “shopping the perimeter of the store”. If we stay true to this rule, we’d be in OK shape – walking from dairy to meat to fruits and veggies and then to the bakery. This is the 1/4 of the store where the actual food is, but I’ve still not found a way to avoid diving into the middle aisles.

So we start on the perimeter with the glistening refrigerated cases of dairy products. Dairy is a good choice for Elle with lots of calcium, good fat and protein and not a lot of carbs to worry about. We don’t need much here because we are fortunate enough to have a Milkman. Yes, a Milkman! Just like the old days, we have a little white truck that drops off milk, eggs and a few other must haves to get us through to the end of the week. I try to get all of our milk from the milkman because it’s the only place I can get local milk direct from a NH farm. More on that later. One thing we always stock up on are Stonyfield Super Smoothies not just because they are great, but also for those times when Elle goes low in the middle of the night. She’s become pretty good at drinking while sleeping, and when you poke a straw through the little foil cover under the cap, it’s almost spill proof.

Then we’re at the deli. The whole idea of cured meat has never made us fans of the deli, but through Type 1 eyes, we’ve found a new appreciation in the giant cases of “free” food – carb free that is. Elle likes having a couple of slices of pepperoni in her lunch or some baked ham, shaved thin. Not that it makes much of a difference with carbs but I’ve never realized how hard it is to get something as simple as baked ham.

“Could I get a half a pound of baked ham please?”
“Honey Baked Ham?”
“No just Baked Ham please”
“How about some Virginia Honey Baked.”
“Any plain Virginia Baked?”
“Nope, just Honey Baked”
“OK … I guess”

Then it’s on to the middle aisles and this is where the label reading begins. The cereal aisle is a modern wonder of the world. An 80-foot long, 7 foot high wall of processed goodness. Shouldn’t breakfast cereal be one of those things, like bread and yogurt, that shouldn’t be too hard to get right? Elle doesn’t eat a lot of cereal for breakfast, but it’s nice to have one kind on hand that she likes so we start picking through some choices and studying our breakfast. Wow! Is this stuff even food? It must be food because most of them have positive nutrition claims on the front of the box. Whole Grain Trix? Coco Puffs are apparently a good source of Calcium and other Vitamins. According to the front of these boxes, these cereals are full of fiber and other good things.

What am I missing? This is what I find on the nutrition information posted on the cereal boxes – sugar, corn syrup, hydrogenated whatever and enough chemicals and preservatives to keep each bite bright and crispy until the next Ice Age. The boxes look more like toys than food. We finally settle on some of your good old-fashioned Cheerios and some oatmeal.

On it goes through the middle aisles – choosing, reading, unchoosing, learning and talking as we go. Is a 26g granola bar good enough to be 1/2 of lunch? What’s high maltose corn syrup? What’s BHT and why is it used to preserve freshness, and more importantly, why are they calling it BHT instead of it’s real name? It must have a real name right? We end up at the very end of the middle aisles and feel like we’ve made some good choices and some good compromises.

The rest of the shopping is easy – picking up as many fruits and veggies as we can eat in a week without spoiling. We start in the organic section because we’ve made the commitment to buy organic whenever we can and suck up the extra $25 – $50 per week. As I’m bagging up my broccoli, I’m wondering why we don’t put it in a box with a cartoon character on it like the cereal. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll work on that?

Grocery shopping is like anything else where making good choices requires making the time and having the resources to make choices. With all of the choices we have, trying to do all of this in 45 minutes is nuts. It’s very hard to find the time and make the time to talk about food, to plan meals, to bring the kids, to shop slowly, and to read the ingredients.

While this is hard for us, it must be nearly impossible for millions of families with more challenging circumstances. This process would feel dramatically different if I didn’t have a choice but to bring all of my four kids together, if my time were stretched thin because I was juggling two or more jobs, or if I had a budget so tight that cost per calorie was the deciding factor. The fact is, healthy food can be really expensive. That is, if you don’t count the hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care costs that your kids and our country will incur later to manage their Type II diabetes. The cost of good food is a major factor at the root of our Type II diabetes epidemic.

I’m thankful that Elle is 10, and so has the ability to reason. She’s old enough to understand that we’re really trying to make good choices to keep our family healthy. When it does turn into a fight, I remind myself that this is not a fight between me and my child – it is a fight between us and the food industry. It’s not a fair fight when you think about all of the marketing power, science, and technology they have on their side. This is why we need to stick together and be armed with as much information as we can find and share.