So, I’m sitting here after a morning at the park, eating some leftover salad, getting ready to tackle some Ratzinger. Might as well talk about food.
Moving means transition. It means adaptation. It means finding new places to buy your stuff. Not as easy as it sounds.
There are, to be sure, more options down here, and I don’t live very far away from any of them. The trouble is, no single store combines quality and price, but given the price of gas, it doesn’t make much sense anymore to drive around, clutching coupons, buying your produce in one store and your cereal in another. Not, from a time perspective, it probably ever did.
(It should surprise no one to learn that I am not, to say the least, an organized grocery shopper. I don’t do lists unless a) I’m doing a recipe that requirs specific ingredients or b)there’s something I’ve needed to get for the last three shopping trips and have managed to forget every time.  And then most of the time I leave the list in the car, anyway.
I’m sitting here, too, at 12:44 with no real, concrete concept of what we’ll eat tonight. One of the most cheering moments of my life occurred when we first moved to FW, as a matter of fact, and we were at the home of an OSV associate, a happy, busy home of, at that time, four children, I believe, and the wife/mom answered a child’s question about what was for dinner with a shrug. She said wryly, “You know, it happens every day – dinner happens every day. I know it’s coming. But every day, around four, I’m still surprised that once more, I’ve got to figure out what to fix.” )
Anyway, as I said, there are several shopping choices here:
Bruno’s is a local chain. A little expensive. To the Fort Wayne peeps -sort of comparable to Scott’s before it was bought out by Kroger.
Winn-Dixie.
Piggly-Wiggly. I will never forget the first time Joseph saw the Piggly-Wiggly. It was in July, and the children and I were driving around, trying to figure out the town and scope out houses, I think. The need for a bathroom emerged. I used the GPS, trying to find a McDonald’s or something, bu before we got there we ended up in Mountain Brook. Joseph broke out into a gale of laughter and pointed ” Piggly-Wiggly!” he chortled. It was seriously one of the funniest things he thought he had ever seen.
The Piggly-Wigglies (okay, it is funny) here are interesting because they seem to me to be mostly located in the high-end neighborhoods – small stores, usually the only grocery store in that area. Useful in an emergency, but sort of pricey, it seems. Different from my memory of Piggly-Wiggly (stop laughing), which is centered on my childhood visits to my paternal grandparents in Durant, Oklahoma. I still cannot even think of Piggly-Wiggly (stop!) without the name pronounced in my grandmother’s voice.
Publix.  Here’s the thing about Publix. For several years, I lived in Lakeland, Florida, which is the headquarters of Publix, and while I was living there I developed a deep hatred of the chain. Oh, they are good stores with high quality produce and such, but I really experienced them as a monopoly down there – they didn’t double coupons (they do here, though, I’ve noticed), their prices were higher than anyone else, but they slowly and inexorably drove the competition out. Well, I guess I can’t complain because if the competition failed that ‘s because more people liked Publix. Fine.  But I’m still not wild about them.
Wal-Mart. Argh. I hate shopping at Wal-Mart, but I do. It’s crazy (and if you want to get into the Wal-Mart wars, feel free). Their produce generally is not very good (except for the stuff – like carrots and onions that you can’t wreck) and the meat tastes like cardboard, in my opinion. But the prices. And the fact that everything’s there. Stop tempting me!
We have a Super Target a mile away that I use, but I find the prices there, especially on produce, higher than I’m willing pay for what you get.
I’ve hunted out some local produce markets – two pretty close to our apartment – where I’ve been buying produce. It’s more expensive than Wal-Mart but the big plus is that it tastes like something.
Then there’s the fact that we have not only a Fresh Market two miles down in one direction, but also a huge, bustling Whole Paycheck Foods two miles in the other. We had  Fresh Market in Fort Wayne, which I liked (sort of) until they stopped selling containers of parmesan rinds (good for putting into soup) and then told me, in response to my request, that I could have the rinds if I, you know, bought the cheese. Three pounds of parmesan I do not need.
I’m okay with Whole Foods even as I resist the cult of it. It’s an inviting, even seductive place, but there are those prices to consider. I can get quality local produce for less than I can at WF, and the prepared stuff, while it looks gorgeous, is quite expensive. I do watch out for specials and I’m actually finding a few items that are cheaper or at least comparably priced to other stores. A year ago, before food prices started shooting up, they wouldn’t have been, but now, with regular eggs at 1.69/dozen, I’m going to be okay with spending 2.69/dozen for hand-selected, cage-free eggs once every ten days or so. The rBGH-free milk is priced at what regular milk is at Wal-Mart these days. I guess it’s their loss-leader. I’ve even found things like beef stock (I make chicken stock, but have no temptation to do crack and roast beef bones or whatever you do to make it) for less than the cheapest grocery store.
So I’ll selectively shop for that stuff there, saving a few dollars which are immediately blown on cookies for little boys.
Now…what’s for dinner?
 
Update:
Thanks for the PP update on WF. Yikes.
From the comments – this will warm the heart of parents everywhere. As well as make you choke on your coffee because you’re laughing so hard:
Ketchup soup has been billed as a delicacy in our house when I just couldn’t quite get my act together in enough time to get to the store before dinner. I figure 95% of dinner is selling it to people who pretty much really would rather starve than eat something un-brown, unwhite, or un-yellow. LOL! One week I got so sick of everybody always asking for noodles for dinner- and we were seriously broke that week- we had Glorious Noodle Week. We made signs. We made necklaces. We had noodles in different forms for 7 straight days for lunch and dinner. Know what they asked for next week?….Noodles. I figure I’ll worry about what’s for dinner, when I actually get to make edible food again.