Barbara J. Hamby

Adventure in the Grocery Aisles

Ever since I began living a healthier lifestyle, grocery shopping has become a time-consuming adventure. Even though I’m a fairly fast reader, skimming through all the fine-print nutrition information on food packages takes time. You can’t believe anything you read on the rest of the package label; I hope the nutrition information is at least close.

The words “healthy” or “natural” are often the most misleading. A lot of them have an overabundance of natural sugar and sodium, among other things. And if you don’t read the nutrition information, you take your life in your hands.

Sometimes I wonder if I will live long enough to get a believable explanation of why products with less sugar and/or sodium are more expensive than the loaded ones. I don’t usually see any expensive ingredients listed, such as herbs or spices that replace the sugar and salt. A frozen meal I selected had very low sugar and sodium and was double the price of some of the other packages.

When I mentioned that to the cashier at Safeway this afternoon, she added that it seems obvious the reason for so much obesity in this country is that healthy foods are more expensive.

I don’t know how we can change that. I know that low-income apartment dwellers are discouraged from growing their own vegetables—some don’t have yard space and some have regulations against it. Several years ago I had a tomato plant in my front yard at another apartment in this complex but management told me not to do that again. So I grew tomatoes on my deck, but they didn’t ripen as well.

Now I read that cooked tomatoes are better for us than fresh, so I eat canned tomatoes or tomato sauce. That saves me planting, watering and weeding, and at my age, I’m getting lazy. Of course, I have to watch how much sugar has been added to the cooked tomatoes.