An Exercise in Humility

This trip to the grocery store wasn't very fun.

I had been to Giant Eagle just the day before, buying my own groceries. It was enjoyable, as are most of my trips to the grocery store. But this trip felt like a ton of work, and really actually stressed me out.

It started with the menu and planning of meals for four people. I usually just cook for myself, so taking the time to look at recipes and calculate how much I would need was a hassle, and was very time intensive. This relates back to class discussions we've had about convenience; I just felt like I didn't have the time to work all of this out, and I wasn't even taking into consideration price, how much I could buy in bulk and use before it went bad, nutritional information at all, or how my other non-existent family members felt about the meals, let alone whether they were local, organic, or fair-trade.

This was when I first started realizing that our common classroom topic of informing people about food and health is part of a much, much larger solution, and that what seemed like simple, individual issues (lack of time, lack of information, economic constraints, stress levels) really compound and create a ball of an issue that feels impossible to solve.

The actual purchasing of the food also brought me down, as I spent about two hours trying to find everything, find the cheapest way to make the meals work, and keep track of the nutritional information. It was a lot to handle. Much of the cheapest options felt "bad" to buy, for lack of a better word. Looking at a pasta sauce that had whole chunks of vegetables, looked a lot more rich in color and flavor, and had much more appealing advertising, and then having to reach to the bottom shelf and grab the blandest looking sauce just felt like I was going to be missing out, regardless of how the sauces actually tasted.

The sodium content was surprisingly high, especially for the packed foods, like the aforementioned pasta sauce, as well as the chicken and cheese. I think that my grocery list is actually much more healthy than what my parents would have usually made, and features no pre-made or easy-to-make shortcuts, which I'm sure comes with a ton of sodium. The lack of sugar was also a surprise, outside of the fruits and sauces.

While I think that maybe my menu was too vegetable-heavy for me to see the full effects of the assignment, it still made me realize that I've built up a lot of knowledge of food and recipes, as well as a pantry full of things that I don't need to buy constantly, and eating better (which is a very loaded term) is much easier for a well-educated single college student with ample time to do the legwork than someone working full-time and feeding a larger family, starting from scratch.