mousme: A view of a woman's legs from behind, wearing knee-high rainbow socks. The rest of the picture is black and white. (Soaring)
mousme ([personal profile] mousme) wrote2007-01-28 10:50 pm

A few things before bed

I went shopping at Loblaws yesterday.

1- Food is becoming stupidly expensive. I categorically refuse to spend $6.00 on American broccoli. Broccoli is not worth $6.00. I am going to go to my local fruit & veggies store and see if theirs is cheaper (and hopefully locally-grown!).

I am looking at the food I eat lately, in terms of how far it's had to travel to get to me, and it makes the mind boggle. Does anyone out there know of a good book which can tell me what kind of fruits (apart from apples) are grown locally? What the hell did people do before oranges and lemons were consistently available in cold climates?

Anyway.

2- I brought my two eco-bags with me, and am pleased to report that all my shopping fit in them, apart from potatoes, cat litter and cat food, for which I didn't use bags at all. Normally that would have taken at least six or seven plastic bags (and if I'd put the big stuff in bags too, it'd be more like twenty bags!).

More on this later. I am working out a plan in my head to get my grocery shopping done entirely without the use of a gasoline-dependent machine. However, I'm not there yet.

3- People are, fundamentally, pretty okay. I was trying to get the cat litter off a high shelf, and since it was almost all gone, the containers were wedged way at the back of the shelf. I am not short (5'7" which is the national average for women my age), but my fingers didn't *quite* reach that far. So I asked a woman taller than I if she could bring down a container for me, and she complied, although she looked a bit bemused. It was nice. :)

4- I bought a pot roast. They were on sale for something like $1.99 a pound. Tomorrow I shall stick it in my slow-cooker, or something like that, and have a lovely meal. Several lovely meals, more like.

Now I am off to bed. I've been getting to sleep far too late, these days.

[identity profile] mousme.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 03:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Yep. I couldn't find a single damned local vegetable at my Loblaws. It was most disheartening.

Next time, I'm going to try my local place. [livejournal.com profile] ai731 and [livejournal.com profile] baronscartop tell me that it's quite good and very reasonably priced.

[identity profile] curtana.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 03:29 pm (UTC)(link)
couldn't find a single damned local vegetable at my Loblaws.

's cause it's January ;)

[identity profile] ai731.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 03:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Not necessarily. There's sometimes quite a lot of local greenhouse-grown vegetables. And since the greenhouses are heated with electricity from renewable sources (leaving asside the ecology of building massive hydro dams), they're probably more environmentally sound than vegetables trucked here from California. In my experience, IGA is better at stocking local stuff than Loblaws.

[identity profile] curtana.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 03:38 pm (UTC)(link)
My point was not that there's no local produce in January, just that I've generally seen more of it at Loblaws in the summer and fall.

[identity profile] curtana.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 03:49 pm (UTC)(link)
No offence taken :)

[identity profile] mousme.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 03:40 pm (UTC)(link)
They didn't even have stuff that might've been preserved from the autumn harvest. Even ridiculously overpriced, I might've considered that. :P

Oh well. :)

[identity profile] ai731.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 03:45 pm (UTC)(link)
I know what you mean. I was livid one time in November when oranges and lemons and limes from California and Africa were on sale and I couldn't find a single bag of local cranberries; which should have been in season, dammit.

[identity profile] mousme.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 05:04 pm (UTC)(link)
Really? Not even cranberries? Argh!

How hard is it to grow cranberries, do you suppose?

[identity profile] joane.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 06:36 pm (UTC)(link)
I think you need a bog for cranberries; I don't know if they can be cultivated at the backyard level with any real efficacy.

[identity profile] ai731.livejournal.com 2007-01-29 07:34 pm (UTC)(link)
They have them again now, frozen rather than fresh (which is fine, because I was just going to throw them in the freezer anyway for our weekly muffins); but I was really annoyed at the time that all this out-of-season imported stuff was cheap and I couldn't buy the local in-season fruit that I wanted.