Homemade humus, organic eggs, spinach lasagna, free range chickens, seven grain bread, lentils, bean sprouts.
What is earthy-cruchy? Are you crunchy? Would you drive to 20 miles to Whole Foods for organic eggs (oh, the fossil fuel emissions) and spend five bucks more than what you could have picked up at Shop-Rite?
Apt. 11d 
We’re somewhat crunchy. I wouldn’t drive 20 miles to buy eggs at a Whole Foods, partly because, for all my talk about simplicity, sometimes simplicity has a lot of costs that just don’t add up, and driving a long ways to shop at a big organic chain is such a case. (I’m not saying there’s no point in choosing to do such–I don’t have a major problem with Whole Foods per se–but on a certain level, when you have to face up to the need to just deliver the goods to where the people can buy them, I think Shop-Rite isn’t all that much better or worse than the crunchiest chain around.) However, we do buy our vegetables at a local farmer’s market from April through October. And we do drive about 20 miles–actually, more like 30–to buy about two months worth of eggs and meat at a time from a farmer we know. In that case, since we can buy direct from the source and in bulk, the costs balance out, or at least we think so.
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Our local Stop n’ Shop now sells their own brand of cage-free eggs, which makes them a lot cheaper
We might drive 20 miles for free-range meats (and then use the deep freeze), if we had to. Luckily we don’t; it is one small reason we live where we do. I can stop at Whole Foods on my bike ride from work.
The premium for free-range meat is tough. In general, we compensate by eating less meat overall. But big holiday dinners can really set you back. A 12 pound holiday ham is a killer.
Free-range lamb is usually a really good buy. Love those Australians.
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I’m not so much about the crunchy as I am about supporting local businesses and farms. I drive right past a Whole Foods so that I can shop at an locally owned Italian market. The store has really skinny aisles that are difficult to navigate with a cart, the lines for the deli and the butcher are long and they’re pricey. However, everyone knows my name, they go way out of their way to get a product I’m interested in trying and the girls at the deli know my taste (and my husband’s) so well that they will often recommend stuff to us and never once have they been off the mark.
I don’t buy organic produce (we grow a lot of our own produce), but I do buy free range, no hormone, no unnecessary antibiotics meats and eggs.
Also- I drive a super low emissions car.
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“I’m not so much about the crunchy as I am about supporting local businesses and farms.”
Catie, I would say such economic localism is entirely crunchy. That’s kind of what I was getting at above with my distinction between Whole Foods and Shop-Rite; while I like what Whole Foods is doing, especially from an environmental standpoint, beyond a certain point it’s still making organic foods part of an economic chain that, at the very best, doesn’t do much for “crunchy” virtues, and maybe hurts them. At that level, it’s just about delivering goods, and if you need what you can only afford (in terms of both price and travel time) at Shop-Rite, then the conclusion is obvious.
So I’d encourage people to shop at places like Whole Foods, if that’s a readily available and financially feasible option, but it’s not The Big Solution. Keeping alive the local deli isn’t The Big Solution either, but I do think, in the grand scheme of things, it’s at least as big as anything else, and maybe quite a bit bigger.
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i am, i think relative to the rest of the country, fairly crunchy. though since i live in a hippy haven, for around i could be considered almost downright conservative. heh.
when i grocery shop, i buy almost exclusively organic produce & free-range meats & poultry. however, i do not shop at whole foods or wild oats; they are not located in our town. we are blessed to have a great co-op, and a terrific farmer’s market in the summer.
i go out of my way to try to buy only locally-grown produce & meats; in the summer that is easy, because of the farmer’s market, but in the winter it gets more challenging. green leafy vegetables are great, but i do get a hankering for some variety and will buy veggies grown in a neighboring state to break the monotony of chard.
my overall consumerism level is i think below average for someone of my age, education, and profession in this country. i make choices about what not to buy, so that i can afford to buy organic and/or locally-grown food as much as possible, even if the price is slightly higher.
i also have opted to take a job that pays less than what i could make in a more urban area — where i would make more money but i would have to decide whether or not to shop at whole foods, because riding my bicycle to the local co-op would not be an available choice.
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There isn’t much difference between a chicken sitting in its own caged-shit and a chicken running around in other chicken’s shit in a coup. So that’s a big negatory on the eggs.
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There’s the broken wing issue, unless my info is out of date.
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Somewhat crunchy. I buy organic milk and free range eggs, but I usually buy them in the regular grocery store rather than at Whole Foods. I do like Whole Foods, though, but it’s more because the produce is generally (though not always) of higher quality (even the conventional produce) than in the local Kroger, plus they have “gourmet” ingredients that are hard to find elsewhere. In MD, I shopped at WF a lot, because it was about 5 minutes away. I made quick trips to the neighborhood Giant (also known as the “ghetto” Giant) for emergencies and to Superfresh for staples. Here, in Columbus, the only WF is totally on the other side of the city (probably *is* about 20 miles). I go infrequently and stock up on things that I can’t find elsewhere (such as “natural” meats, real Parmesan cheese, bulk dried fruits and vegetables, Veggie Booty, etc., etc.). Last time I went, I spent $200, but I don’t expect I’ll be back for another month or two. If you’re going to buy organic, BTW, it’s definitely cheaper to buy it at WF than at a normal grocery (free range eggs are $3 per dozen at Kroger, and $1.79 at WF…not worth the extra gas, but worth buying if I’m there).
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I’m evidentally a spoiled brat. We have two Whole Foods in our small city, plus 2 Trader Joe’s. I don’t have to drive anywhere. Plus, our local Stop and Shop markets have a full line of organic products that I do purchase, and now our new Shaws markets also have a big line of organics.
I don’t consider myself remotely crunchy. We eat plenty of good old sugar and white flour products and junk food is a must at our house, but I do buy only organic veggies. Meat is Kosher and thus less repugnant than regularly grown meat and poultry, but I buy organic Kosher poultry anyhow. I think there is a difference between crunchy and wanting to avoid pesticides. I like organic because I’m anti-poison, but that doesn’t mean that I’d go insane if I had to eat plain old fruits and veggies.
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I think there is a difference between crunchy and wanting to avoid pesticides.
There must be a lot of kinds of crunchy. We buy free-range meat and eggs purely for humanitarian reasons. We intermittently buy organic milk because it tastes better, but from what I’ve seen dairy cows are relatively well treated.
As for the veggies, I’m fine with conventional. We do buy from farmers markets in the summer because of the better quality and selection, but pesticides don’t worry me. Wax on the apples, no problem. Genetically modified foods — I’m all for ’em.
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We are earthy but not crunchy. We changed all of our bulbs to flourescent, keep the heat as low as we can, and make sure we turn lights off in rooms that we aren’t in. We’ve looked at installing corn powered furnace and will go with solar once the cost of panels comes down even further so that we don;t have to aggregate the cost over a decade or more. As for food and such, I’ve yet to see what the difference is a chicken that is bred in cage and then killed versus one that is suppossedly free range and killed. Same dude wringing same birds neck. What I would like to see is increases in food standards, and increase in teh amont of goods that are recycled, and to see more people use ebay and free-cycle to get rid of their stuff to those that will use it. Lastly, I’d liek to see the contined use of waste water and gasses from dumps to power the surrounding area and reduce the costs.
America is the great hypocrisy: we have great food quality that is healty and relatively free of disease as a whole. Yet we want to regress ? !
Having eaten food from actual butchers in other countries, americans need to get over the guilt of enjoying their food. Besides, organic food is inefficiently raised, labor will collectively always be higher than larger farms and they will eventually fail unless major agri companies decide to switch over to archaic methods of production. Why don’t people focus on the migrant labor used for getting the food and processing it rather than how the birds have been treated?
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