I kind of like grocery shopping. I even go grocery shopping when I travel. With the same interest that another person might bring to a museum, I visit the tiny Italian market with the great deals on olive oil and the Middle Eastern joint with fresh pita and hummus. “Look! Adriatic fig spread!”
Increasingly, though, I find my weekly journey to the Big Store, as opposed to my more piecemeal and enjoyable trips to our local coop, to be a minefield of difficult choices. Organically grown or genetically modified? Fair trade or potential child labor? Sugar sweetened or pumped up with high fructose corn syrup? Free roaming or caged to an nth of its life? Local or flown halfway around the globe?
A banana is no longer just a banana. It’s a small yellow object containing a plethora of economic, political, and ethical issues—an object worthy of tremendous anxiety for the contemporary mother.
As an aware home cook and lover of food, I’d face these dilemmas no matter what, but they are all the more acute when I’m shopping for my children. Motherhood is inextricably wrapped up in providing for our children, as my daughter recently reminded me. I’d snapped at her for ordering me around like a servant. “My job is not picking up after you,” I said, exasperated. With the clear logic and cheer of a six-year old she said, “Your job is to keep us safe and love us.” Indeed. Which is exactly what I try to do at the grocery store. And yet, too often, I come away feeling a failure.
Have I failed more if I spend my kids’ college savings on healthy food or have I failed more if I fill them full of chemicals and help destroy the planet in doing so? Take chicken, for example. If my bank account is low, which it often is, that cut up fryer for $2.99 a pound is very tempting. There are two meals in that package, not to mention the stock I’ll make from the bones. But then I think of my friend who grows his own chickens because, as he says, if you’ve ever walked into a poultry processing plant, you’d never eat another factory bird. He didn’t give me any particulars, and I didn’t ask, but the look of repulsion on his face has stayed with me and is enough to move my hand over to the $7.99 per pound free-range bird.
So, I’ve got the chicken, now I need some veggies. Staring at the long produce aisle, my mind goes blank, again, as to which ones are truly toxic and always to be avoided in their non-organic form, and which ones are just sort-of bad. It’s like trying to remember how to spell “vacuum.” Dammit, which is the double letter? An ongoing conundrum is the fact that broccoli, despite all those florets that look like perfect hiding places for noxious pesticides, is not on the “definitely buy organic” list, whereas the smooth-skinned, easy-to-clean pepper is. Bananas are likewise confusing. I mean, they’re in a peel. You take it off, right? But then I think of my friend Hope, who lived in Central America, and her descriptions of the men who worked for major producers who are sterile from working with the pesticides. You bet I grab the organic ‘nanners every time, even if they are a good quarter more per pound than their Thiabendazole-covered neighbors.
As much as possible, I avoid the middle aisles with their lurking chemical combinations—transfats and their brethren. I make our salad dressing and try to bake cookies every other week or so. The decisions I do need to make in these sections are among the hardest. Standing with two jars of jam in hand, I read and re-read the labels, searching for the logic. It’s cheaper to buy the kind with corn syrup than the other with plain sugar. It’s cheaper to buy the one with more sugar as opposed to the jar with reduced sugar. The reasoning behind this is on par with the fact that it’s cheaper to fly from New York to London than it is from Iowa to Nebraska.
