When you don’t work full-time at a job, you have a lot of time to micro-manage your food supply. I am astonished at how complex it’s gotten to keep my pantry stocked. You’d thing, being that I can walk to about six grocery stores and one is Whole Foods and one is the local organic co-op, that that would be enough for me, wouldn’t you? Take a gander at the list:

1. Jubilee Farm: This is where I get my CSA most of the year.  In the summer time, I pick up a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables from the farm every week; it’s barely challenging to keep up with but I love it.  Last summer I froze or otherwise preserved some things that we are still eating.  I also get a weekly box delivered to Seattle the rest of the year, although there is a hiatus for most of December and January.  Although it’s a lot of fresh produce, it’s not enough for 5-7 home-cooked meals, so I supplement from other souces.  However, the off-season box comes with a dozen farm-fresh eggs every other week.  Farm fresh eggs are GOOD.
2. Spud: This is a weekly deliver service that focuses on local and organic foods.  I get some produce from here–almost all of it, right now, and I’ll still get some when the CSA starts back up again.  More importantly, Spud is my source for the best local milk.  This is where I’m really going to show off how insane I am.  They have a brand that is vat-pasteurized, where the milk is only heated to 145 degrees and kept there for 30 minutes, instead of the more common high-heat-short-time pasteurization where it goes to at least 163 degrees (often higher) for 15 seconds and then is rapidly cooled.  Don’t even talk to me about ultra-pasteurization, where the milk heats to 280 degrees for two seconds.  That stuff is gnarly, I can’t drink it.  Yes, I have a very highly attuned milk palate.
3. Amazon Fresh: This is the latest addition to our household food supply, and let me tell you: it’s the bomb.  It’s unkind of me to gloat about it, since it’s only available to a select few Seattle zip codes and nowhere in the rest of the country.  In fact 98115 was only added a week ago, after a very competitive voting with four other zips.  I received at least three emails from neighbors urging me to make my voice heard: such is the longing for this service.  The deal is basically this.  Your order groceries from a huge online selection, which includes frozen, refrigerated, and dry goods as well as produce.  The user interface is as elegant as you’d expect Amazon to be.  Then you hit submit, and your groceries are delivered.  I believe you can get them within a few hours if you want.  I have chosen to place my order by midnight and have them on my doorstep by 6 am the next morning, which is easiest since I can only spend time on the computer after Rosalind has gone to bed, anyway.  There is a $30 minimum and $75 minumum to avoid the $5 shipping fee, but that’s not difficult.  Can I say it again?  I *love* Amazon Fresh.
4. Thundering Hooves Pastured Meats: After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I realized my happy thoughts when buying “free-range” meat at the grocery store were misguided to say the least.  So I did a little online research and found Thundering Hooves.  For my first order, I got a truly free-range turkey that we ate for Thanksgiving, four pasture-raised whole chickens, and a family sampler pack of pork products.  (Luckily we have a trunk freezer.)  Holy Moly this meat is good!  It’s incredibly flavorful compared with even the “organic” meats you get at the grocery store.  And it doesn’t hurt the tast to know I’m not contributing to either the animal suffering or the environmental problems that go along with factory farmed meat, either.
5. Grocery/Whole Foods: OK, so I still do go to the yippie grocery store fairly regularly, although you’d think I wouldn’t need to after all that.  For one thing, we don’t have a local fish market, and we have trout, catfish, or salmon at least once a week.  And then there are the store-brand items I’ve gotten attached to, particularly cheerios.  The bulk foods are also nice, not just for rice and lentil and the like but also herbs and spices.  Whole Foods has good espresso, too.  And we have some coupons.

There you are, that’s where the bulk of our food comes from.  It’s not completely the whole story–we still eat strawberries out of the freezer that we u-picked over the summer, for example.  There’s even still a little tomato puree in there from my own pathetic garden.

You may wonder why I felt the need to explicate all this in my blog.  Frankly, I’m wondering that a little myself now that I’m done!  But I feel a great satisfaction in contemplating all the places I gather healthy food for my family, just as I love putting it all together into meals that nourish us, body and spirit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 5:37 am and is filed under lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.