organic

I'm house-sitting in Maine this week, so I've been going to the giant grocery stores here.  One of the ironies of living in New York is that unless you happen to be near one of the great markets (Fairway, Whole Foods, etc.) the grocery shopping is terrible.  These huge markets with good produce are heaven to me.

However, I noticed that the organic stuff is very expensive.  Green onions are $0.89 for conventionally grown and $2.50 for organic.  Most of the other stuff was around twice the price.  I don't usually see this because the market I shop at has virtually nothing organic.  (Yay New York!)

I thought the environmental argument in Michael Pollan's article -- basically that petroleum-based fertilizer is destroying the ocean -- was pretty compelling, but these prices are pretty hard to stomach.  (Intended.)  Are the rest of you buying organic foods, or just reusing your shopping bags and calling it a day?

We're buying mostly organic (all meat,  80% of our fruit, veg and dairy)  and shopping is so much more expensive - though i think prices have gone up anyway.  Eg a pat of non-organic butter 18months ago cost 80p.  Now I pay £1.80 for organic.  And regular has gone up to £1.15.    Hence all the lentils.

London is great for organic food - all the big supermarkets stock it, there are organic butchers and greengrocers within 30 minutes walk of almost anywhere i'd be prepared to bet.  In our area, which is far from fully gentrified yet, we have organic butchers, greengrocers, cafes and delis.  You can't move without someone beating you round the head with an organic sourdough.  The park cafes are all organic. The bloody ice creams in the shop on the corner arre organic!    And the whole city's gone box crazy... i have a monthly box of happy meat delivered from helen browing:  http://www.helenbrowningorganics.co.uk/ , and have only just abandoned my weekly veg box because i'm finding the time to go to the greengrocers every couple of days. 

I'm fairly confident though that there's not a chance in hell I'd be doing all this if I didn't have children: I'd have neither the time nor the same level of concern.    In Defense of Food is fantastic, but it does seem to suggest that you need one person in each household at home all the time, making the home.  Not sure I disagree, but even less sure where that leaves us all...

We still do as much organic as possible, but we are lucky living in Seattle.  We belong to a CSA, which is around 30/week and covers about 70% of our produce.  We get organic milk at Trader Joe's, and good eggs and hormone-free chicken there (I don't pay extra for the organic chicken and eggs).  Whole foods is very near by, so we have easy access to anything organic, but I don't always pay the extra.  I didn't read the book so I don't know if he covers this, but given the choice between something truly local from a smaller farmer w/out the organic certification and something organic from California, I generally choose the local, I figure saving the pollution it takes to transport it here is worth something.

We have a similar organic explosion to what Claire describes in London, but at $3.50 for a very small organic ice cream at the very hip new organic ice cream place, we don't plan to make a habit of it.

We don't plan to stop shopping at Whole Foods as money gets tighter, although I hear people are.  Life's too short to eat bad food.  We are trying to eat out less, and eat less meat and less packaged stuff.