The entire Guide to Good Food series has been developed to help you get to know your food, but here’s an easy tip to help you when shopping. This will apply mainly to grocery stores, not to farmers’ markets where you’re buying your food direct.
As you look for fruits and vegetables, especially now at the end of summer when stores will be overflowing with farm produce, look for the labels found on the food. For small items like mushrooms or green beans, look for the numbered label on signage or the container they’re placed in. These numbers are PLU (price look-up) codes and are used on food that’s sold loose, by bunch, by weight or individually.
To know what kind of food you’re buying -
- A five-digit number beginning with 9 means it’s organic.
CATEGORIES: Environment
We’ve given you a few tips on how to stretch your food dollars (see Shop Sustainable – Money). This week, we’ll help you determine which local sustainable and/or organic foods you can incorporate into your food budget.
There’s no doubt about it – organic and sustainable food is often more expensive than industrially raised and overly processed foods. And you are on a budget, so what can you do?
Shopping Choices
First, look at what you’re eating and consider cutting out some of the non-nutritious items you spend money on. No one is saying to cut out everything, but if you’re drinking soda, try tap water. Or try tap water in place of every other can of pop. You could also try cutting out meat one day a week, or be daring and go for two meatless days a week! Meat is usually the most expensive item you buy in the supermarket. Good food advocate Michael Pollan is now extolling the virtues of our sister program Meatless Monday, where you can find recipes for healthy, delicious and inexpensive meatless meals, along with information about the many benefits of reducing meat in your diet. Check out and download their Meatless Monday Recipe booklet. Read the rest of this entry >>
CATEGORIES: Environment
We’ve talked about finding sustainable food and how to find time to cook in previous posts. This week, we’re going to talk about money. Some sustainable food advocates seem to think we all have a lot of money and can eat organic sustainable food all the time. But, for most of us, that’s simply not the case. So what can you do?
Make choices. You need to decide how much money you can budget for sustainable food, determine which sustainably produced foods you’re going to eat, and decide whether you’re going to choose organic, sustainable, local, or industrially produced items.
Almost everyone is cutting back these days, and for good reason. Many people are out of work and many more are worried they might not have a job in the future; we’ve started watching everything we spend.
How much?
Your first decision is how much money to spend on food each week. Making a budget helps – you can even go so far as to literally put money aside for food purchases.
If you’re looking for ways to increase your food budget but you don’t have extra money coming in, look at your current spending habits and see if you can cut back anywhere. For example:
• If you buy a $3 cup of coffee five times a week, that’s $65 extra dollars a month if you stopped drinking coffee, but, more realistically, if you can cut back to spending $1 a day five times a week on coffee, you’ll save $43 a month. Buy a coffee grinder and machine, some Fair Trade coffee beans, and take your own coffee to work in a reusable metal travel mug. Use it for refills later in the day. You’ll not only get great tasting sustainable coffee, you’ll be helping the environment by not using all those disposable cups.
Read the rest of this entry >>
CATEGORIES: Environment
Last week, we talked about how to find local sustainable food. This week we’re going to look at the realities of eating sustainably when you have a busy life and not a lot of time.
We all have crazy, hectic lives. We rush from one thing to another - to work, picking up children, running errands, and trying to have something of a social life. It can be stressful and not leave a lot of time for cooking and eating at a dinner table. So what can you do?
First, realize that stress over long periods can affect your health, weakening your immune system, making you more susceptible to disease and illness, and bring about depression, fatigue, over- or under-eating, and lower your quality of life. If you factor in a life of eating fast food and other non-nutritious food, you could be looking at some potentially big health problems down the road.
To relieve stress and to get a better quality of life, it is important to slow down a little. Many people find cooking to be meditative and relaxing. So, rather than viewing making meals as a chore, look at it as a way to relax and unwind. The time you spend shopping, cooking and eating a meal can be quality time you have with yourself to relax and enjoy the moment.
Read the rest of this entry >>
CATEGORIES: Environment
When shopping for local, sustainable and/or organic food, there are several factors to take into account, including awareness, access, budget and time.
Awareness
First, you need to know what to look for and to understand what local, sustainable and organic mean. Hopefully, the earlier Guide to Good Food posts have helped explain this.
In an ideal world, shopping sustainably would simply be a matter of learning about the issues and then finding your closest farmers’ market or local sustainable farm. But in reality, things aren’t always that simple. Once you’re aware of the issues and what the terms mean, and you’re motivated to buy sustainable food, you still have to go out and actually get it. And that can be challenging for some.
Access
You need to find places to buy local sustainable food. As we mentioned last week, you can look for food in your regular grocery store, a farmers’ market, you can join a CSA or food buying club, or you can shop at a co-operative or health food store.
Aside from your regular grocery store, how do you find these places? First, look in the Eat Well Guide, where all you have to do is enter your zip code to find great tasting food in your area. In addition, you can also try Local Harvest, for the similar information, as well as for reviews. If you’ve tried both of these guides but didn’t find anything close to you, don’t give up! Try looking in your local yellow pages (printed or online) under “health food” to find both stores and co-operative groceries.
CATEGORIES: Environment
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