foodperson.com

Have you found that grocery shopping is trickier than it used to be? Sure is for me.

I say that as someone who does not mind grocery shopping, at least as long as I can avoid it with the throngs on Saturdays and the geriatric set on Thursdays. (That’s the day after the grocery ads come out.) I’ll admit to being an agist when it comes to grocery shopping. The old folks move real slow, frequently stop to chat and, most troublesome, block the aisles. I’m not in a hurry, but I mean business.

Anyway, my shopping has evolved over the years. Back when I was single and lived within a 5-minute walk of three grocery stores, I had a bad habit of shopping about five times a week. During the child-rearing years, I didn’t have that kind of time. I got into a weekly supermarket routine plus weekly CSA deliveries during half the year, supplanting a large share of my farmers market shopping.

The last couple of years, though, have been inconsistent, and not just with the timing. My food-source interest has expanded. I used to be content with my supermarket groceries plus CSA fruits and vegetables. But now I know more detail about how more kinds of food are produced (and how their production methods affect the environment and the quality of the food), so I find that I also seek out pastured eggs and chickens and beef, and I like to buy organic foods besides what the CSA offers.

Meanwhile, the once fringey health-food crowd at the Merc has expanded its offerings, both going upscale and offering broader selection. The supermarket, for its part, now offers an organic-produce section about the size of the one the Merc offered back when it was on Seventh Street and what the Casbah Market now offers, and the supermarket offers such staples as organic rice, flour and milk. When the Lawrence Farmers Market is open (April to October, more or less), it can fill in the holes in my CSA allotment.

Alas, none of these options seems to have everything I want, and all are locally owned. What to do?

Nowadays, I find I do much of my shopping at the Merc, but I’m not buying a $4.50 tube of toothpaste such as they sell there, and I’ve developed a one-a-day (or two-a-day sometimes) Dove miniatures habit (dark). They carry them at the Merc, but it little packages that cost as much as the bags at Checkers. Meanwhile, at Checkers today, I couldn’t find arborio rice (although I’ve bought it there before) and I’d forgotten that I had coffee on my list, which I wanted to get at the Merc. And so it goes. If I’d gone to the Merc, I have no doubt there would have been something on the list I couldn’t get there.

Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I should I just pick one store and do the best I can. Or, I could complicate my life further by committing to spending some of my grocery dollars at the Casbah. How do you handle such a dilemma? I think it’ll be a two-chocolate day while I ponder.