Grocery Store and Habitual Food

Please write a post about how your family uses grocery stores and the variety of vegetables, fruits, roots, grains, and nuts that you eat in a typical week.

You should include your insights about how grocery stores "push" particular types of products, how you learned (or didn't) to eat a variety of foods, and information about your favorite meals and habitual diet pattern.

In our class exercise I counted approximately 45 vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, and roots that I eat in a typical week. My favorites include arugula, broccoli raab, blueberries, acai, and quinoa. I'm able to buy most of these foods organically at the Park Slope Food Coop. Luckily, our food coop doesn't work the same way as most corporate grocery stores - it doesn't "push" chips and other unhealthy foods - it does provide a lot of organic/local/healthy foods at relatively low prices.

I didn't start out eating such a wide variety of foods. My childhood, as I discussed in an earlier post, was a typical American one. I ate meat and white bread sandwiches with mayonnaise and no vegetables. I remember consciously learning to eat tomatos and lettuce with the help of the McDonald's McDLT, around 12 or 13. When I decided to become vegetarian at the age of 15/16 I had to build my repertoire of foods because my main foods at that time were still meat sandwiches plus pizza and clam chowder from a can. I built my reportoire slowly - gradually eliminating meat (first hamburgers, then hotdogs, then beef in general, etc.) and gradually adding other foods (tofu, soy milk, more broccoli, etc.). By the time I got to college I was vegetarian and ate things like tofu sandwiches, apple-pie, baked potatos (got one version from The Secret Garden and invented another - baked potatos with fresh orange juice and tamari sauce), drank carrot juice, and enjoyed vegetarian chili (pre-made). In other words I was eating a lot the same way, but with different, plant-based ingredients.

I think my number of 45 would have been around 30 before I became a member of the food coop on moving to NYC. It seems that my taste-buds have changed - I can remember eating arugula in a salad during my college years and being surprised that people would eat it on purpose. And this wider variety of foods is much more accessible to me now.