snowy

With the increased scrutiny on global food imports into the United States, it got me wondering where TFPers get their food from. Do you prefer to shop at a traditional grocery store? Do you care where your produce comes from? Or are you a fan of farmer's markets? Or perhaps you only shop at Costco or Sam's Club. There are so many choices for consumers these days.

The fact is, WHERE the food on our table comes from is increasingly complicated, because consumers want the choice of apples in April. Produce in most traditional grocery stores can come from as far away as Chile or New Zealand.

This is the article that brought about my interest in the matter:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/bu...rssnyt&emc=rss

So if we have produce and other foodstuffs from these countries coming in to our country, certainly not all of them are getting caught. Does your food come from foreign sources? Do you know? Does where you shop determine how much you pay attention to the source of your food?

As for my own answers to my questions, I try to shop at a variety of places--one is a traditional grocery store that stocks local produce, the other is the local food co-op with only local, organic produce, and the third is the weekly farmer's market. In summer we buy almost all of our produce from the farmer's market, and I generally only buy what's in season, as if it's out of season it's more likely to come from a foreign source. Our local food co-op has a campaign called the Local Six in which they label products that come from our county and the five counties surrounding it. I can get everything from goat cheese to lambchops to wine to bagels to strawberries grown or produced within the Local 6 (though since my significant other is vegetarian, we usually just stick with buying Local 6 tempeh or tofu). I think it's an interesting concept.

Does the new global food network concern you at all?

__________________
If I am not better, at least I am different. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Willravel

I get my food from a lot of places. I do go to Safeway and traditional supermarkets when I can't find a reasonable version at a place like Trader Joe's. I love getting my fish from the market. I also grow some of my own food, like tomatoes, green beans and some spices.

I'd be willing to pay more for better food. I think people would be better off growing a lot of their own food or buying from local sources. I just wish I had the time to fish for myself.

Laugh-O-Matic

I get my veggies off a number of carts wheeled around outside my house. As far as I know, the vegetables are brought in by trucks from farmers, barring a few middle men. Still very primitive here.

Though, in the monsoon season (now), I get it from a grocery mall/store, just so that I'm assured of good quality. Due to space constraints, we don't grow food here, in town that is.

__________________
How you bore me, Florrie,
With those eyes of vacant blue;
You'll be very sorry, Florrie
If I marry you.
Though I'm easy-goin', Florrie,
This I swear is true,
I'll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,
If I marry you. - Saki.

kurty[B]

Grocery store, for the most part. I go to the Farmer's Market every weekend I'm in town, but that's only during the summer months. When I move into my new home I hope to start growing my own herbs and spices, and will hopefully expand that year after year to various fruits and vegetables that can produce during the short growing season here.

I would prefer to go to a Whole Foods, or Trader Joe's if I had one nearby, and would pay the extra price for better quality food, but our little health food markets where I am don't have the selection of what I would want. I miss the huge granola section at Whole Foods.

pan6467

I buy from a traditional or WalMart.

As a side note: I try to buy only food that states it comes from the USA.

How easy would it be for terrorists to start poisoning our food supply, especially since the FDA has been so weakened it has no power to do anything?

As for the whole global thing, we have been blessed to have fertile soil and enough land to feed not just this nation but the majority of the world.... instead we piss the land away, build up golf courses, condos, suburbs, urban sprawl, whatever... or we pay huge corporations not to farm the land.... and ship our food requirements to nations that have no safety netting on the foods they make.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

roachboy

chicago is the center of the planet meat. i am mostly a vegetarian, but have nothing against meat, so being at the center of the planet meat is neither good nor bad--it simply is.

we do mostly local organic food when we can--we have a csa for the summer which is lovely (most weeks) and supplement that with a range of other things--a nearby polish grocery, an excellent bread bakery in wicker park, a produce market 3 miles or so away, whole paycheck/trade joe's...

i rarely go into mainstream supermarkets any more. strangely, this (and not watching television) are the choices that lead me sometimes to think i dont live in the america other people do, but in a parallel dimension that floats about the frontiers of the Machine, kind of american non-america.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

tecoyah

I chose "other"simply because we use multiple sources. We have the Wegmans chain here....which has a very good selection of organics (and is quite possibly the best grocery store chain in existance), but also belong to a co-op,and occasionally hit up ALDI when money is tight. While we always try to get the least contaminated foods (three kids)....reality has a way of stepping in.

ngdawg

Should have been an option for 'all'...
I buy the fruits and veggies from a veggie market because it's so much cheaper to do so, even if sometimes the visual quality isn't first rate.
Meats and processed foods, etc., come from the local supermarket.
I buy based on need+cost, so I don't do the warehouse stores anymore-buying 10 lbs of something, even if it's cheaper by the pound(which it isn't all the time), is a waste if you only need 2 lbs.

__________________
Don't blame me. I didn't vote for either of'em.

LoganSnake

Whole Foods, Sam's Club, Jewel, Dominick's, Trader Joe's, couple of russian/greek/polish stores. It's a mix of organic (read expensive) and chemical (read cheap) products.

__________________
Maturity is knowing you were an idiot in the past. Wisdom is knowing that you'll be an idiot in the future. Common sense is knowing that you should try not to be an idiot now. - J. Jacques

Kpax

I put traditional grocery store and other.

My food mostly comes from McD's...

xepherys

TotalMILF and I tend to prefer Whole Foods, even though it's a touch pricier we find that things generally DO taste better. We also buy more common items at Costco. There's nothing like a good deal on bulk.

__________________
The prospect of achieving a peace agreement with the extremist group of MILF is almost impossible...
-- Emmanuel Pinol, Governor of Cotobato

My Homepage

Telluride

My girlfriend and I get our food from all sorts of places - regular supermarkets, Trader Joe's, specialty stores, etc. We tend to buy a lot of organic and otherwise healthy stuff. The only thing we don't do is grow our own, since we live in an apartment and don't have a yard.

__________________
"I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice." - Friedrich Hayek

filtherton

I'm fortunate to live in a city with five co-ops in it. I get most of my food from the big one, i only really go to conventional grocery stores when the co-ops are closed. Much of the produce, some of the meat is local. It was a good place to get spinach during the national spinach crisis of 2006. In addition to employing me for a few years it was also where i met my lady.

ItWasMe

I've worked in quality control in the past where I had to eat raw produce (taste testing every 15 minutes) from our country and other countries. I used to get sick every now and then, especially when we were testing produce from other countries. The plant had a mirco lab where they tested the produce for various things before it was shipped to stores. Sometimes we dumped out entire pallets or totes of product that tested poorly in the lab. When we were backlogged, the results might not come back from the lab for a day or two... after I'd eaten it and after I'd gotten sick if I was going to get sick.

Since I left that field, I rarely get sick.

I love the Tuesday and Saturday markets, and local produce stands when I can get there. We grow some of our own, but not enough. I buy the rest at a grocery store. I also prefer USA grown if I can get it, specifically local.

__________________
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .


"Ok, no more truth-or-dare until somebody returns my underwear" ~ George Lopez

I bake cookies just so I can lick the bowl. ~ ItWasMe

noodle

I wish that I lived closer to the farmer's market that is on the other side of town. Problem with our area of Florida is that around this time of year, it's so humid at hot that everything tends to start rotting by 10 am. I have a very weak stomach for rotting food smells and I'm not sure why.

I get most of our food from Publix. Mostly because it's the main thing around. WinnDixie scares me. There's a SuperTarget next door, but everything tends to go bad quickly from there and SuperWalmart. I only buy fresh stuff from Publix because I can get more organic and fresher produce. Ours actually buys from more local places than in most areas. I can't wait for Whole Foods to get here in January. The current natural food markets are either A) astronomically expensive and overpriced for what you are getting or B) so limited in selection that I still have to go somewhere else. The last time I got granola from Whole Foods, though, some funky moth-looking bugs hatched in it. And it wasn't the first time. I'm not in to eating bug eggs, cause that stuff was in an airtight container. Yuk.

__________________

la petite moi

I would adore getting all my food from Whole Foods/Lassen's/Trader Joe's, but unfortunately, that isn't plausible due to finances.