Warning: Rant ahead

Okay, so I’ve been working up to a bit of a rant for a few days now and just hadn’t had a chance to post it.

I do the bulk of the grocery shopping around here. Not all, but the big shopping trips. And I’m trying to do better about not spending a small fortune every time I step foot in the store. Not easy to do these days. As part of that effort we’ve been getting the Sunday Globe and I flip through the coupon sections for things we actually use. . . . I also take the 4 sale flyers from the local shops and go through to see what things are on sale.

I don’t try to buy every single thing we use on sale. My main focus for the sale/coupons stuff are things like toiletries, paper goods, laundry & dish soap and coffee. These all tend to be expensive and we use them often enough and in large enough quantity to make it worth the effort of hunting around for the good deals.

Anyway, so this past week I was going through the flyers and coupons and it really struck me how most of the stuff that the coupons are good for, particularly the things that tend to also be on sale are really C.R.A.P.

See, we’ve also been trying our best to eat healthier. I’m not talking crazy healthy where you never have sugar or a cookie or anything. Just healthier. Our main focus for that is trying to not eat things with Hydrogenated Oils and with corn syrup, especially High Fructose Corn syrup. Do you have any idea how hard it is to avoid those two things? They are in everything these days!

We don’t buy nearly as much of the prepackaged convenience foods as a lot of people I know, but there are some things that we have been buying like breads that really are rather basic and you really have to read the labels to avoid that stuff. Even the breads that advertise as healthy have lots of things that really aren’t so good. For example, D went to the store the other day and got a few things and decided while he was there to grab a pack of the “fresh baked” muffins from their bakery section. Okay, muffins are a good breakfast, aren’t they?

Not these! While we were eating them the next morning we made the mistake of turning the package over and actually reading the label. Each serving had 200 calories and 10 g of fat. Okay, not great but . . . then we looked at the serving size/ servings per container. Would you believe they expect a person to only eat 1 /3 of a muffin?????? Have you met anyone over the age of 3 who only eats one third of a muffin and calls it a meal????? Yeah, so if you eat one whole muffin (and some of us eat more than one) but one whole muffin is 600 calories and 30 grams of fat!!!!! That is 1/3 of the calories I’m suppose to have for the day and 1/2 of the fat!!! And we haven’t even included my coffee in that count! CRAZY!!!

I’m getting to the point where my grocery shopping theories are: If it has packaging its probably bad for your, the more packaging they put on something, likely the worse it is for you to actually eat it. And if the packaging contains any kind of health claims, again, likely not so good. If they are adding “good stuff” to it, like added fiber or vitamins, it probably means they alredy took out the parts that actually were good for you to start with, like whole grains. If the expiration date is say, after your baby is likely to be out of diapers, probably not good for you. For that matter, if it isn’t dairy and they feel the need to put an expiration date on it, likely not good for you. If it says any of the following: “Quicky, Easy, Healthy, New & Improved” on it, its probably CRAP.

Here are some of the things we’ve recently cut from the list of things we buy. Most crackers and prepackaged cookies, with the exception of the “goldfish” crackers from PF which don’t have the really bad stuff and do make a good, if messy, portable toddler snack; Pancake syrup - full of corn syrup. Bisquick - my boys love it for waffles and pancakes but its full of Hydrogenated oils; Most icecreams are full of corn syurp and other junk; anything but plain old scala bread from the store bakery and the occasional bagel; almost anything except veggies from the frozen section; anything that takes more than a minute or a pair of scissors to open.

What do we actually still buy? We shop around the edges of the store mostly, down produce across the meats/fish into the dairy and a quick stop for the scala and a few of the whole grain breads (read carefully) and we don’t go down most of the center isles. Pasta, coffee, canned tomatoes to make sauce (not the jarred junk) and a few things like that. Yes, its more work to cook, but we are foodies and enjoy a good meal so we’d rather take a little extra time and eat something that isn’t as likely to kill us in a few years . . . not easy but worth the effort.

Okay, thanks for letting me rant. I feel much better. Yikes, its later than I realized. Time to go whip up some dinner!