Grocery Store Sticker Shock

I wanted to bake Tuscan Dried Tomato and Herb bread today, but I was a bit short on a few of the ingredients I needed, so I took off early this morning to the grocery store to pick those up and a few other items we were short on. As usual these days, going to the grocery store was a bit of a shock.

These days I go to the grocery stores as little as I can possibly get away with - sometimes as seldom as once every other week. I chose last year when we finished our wonderful-loverly-spacious storage room to start buying staples in bulk to save money and cut down on gas expenses. But this morning we needed some bulk items, fresh milk and meat, so I got up early and headed off to our local Winco Foods.

Winco's prices are generally very good overall and I love their bulk food aisle, although you do still have to compare prices with bulk stuff from other sources to make sure you're getting a good deal. My morning "sticker shock" moment today, however, came when I priced a new roll of aluminum foil for wrapping the finished breads in and found it had gone up about 75% since the last time I bought foil. Whoa. And it hasn't been *that* long since I last bought foil. Maybe a year, maybe a bit more. I tend to use it sparingly and buy the larger packages, so it lasts a while. But nearly 8 dollars for a 200 foot roll of the thin foil? What's going on here?

My previous sticker shock moment happened not more than a couple or three days ago. Last month I bought three 50-pound bags of dried milk from our nearby bulk food dealer, on the assumption that "fresh" milk at the store was going to go up to some ungodly price this fall - rumors were that it might be as much as 5 bucks a gallon by the end of the year. So, considering that we use dried milk a lot anyway and it keeps pretty well (even better once I get it repackaged into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers) I figured it was a good gamble to get as much as we could afford and reasonably use in the next year and put it into storage. So I did.

Three days ago I found out that the bags of milk I bought for 90 dollars a little over a month ago are now going for over 160 dollars a bag, and looking briefly online that seems to be a bargain at the moment. One hundred and sixty dollars a bag, for fifty pounds of dried milk. And this new price means the price of dried milk went up about 75% in just ONE MONTH. I know a lot of that is probably because other people heard the same rumor I heard and demand has driven up the price. But frankly, higher prices are higher prices - my checking account doesn't care if it's an artificially inflated price or if production costs have suddenly skyrocketed. The end result is the same. It'll be interesting to see if prices fall back to where they were or if this commodity will follow the path of others that never *quite* come back down to previous levels after the shock. I suspect the days of 90 dollar a bag dried milk are over.

It's shocks like this that make me wonder if some of the commentators I've been reading online are not right - that the era of "cheap" food may be ending. These last two or three generations here in the US are some of the luckiest in the history of our species because they have not had to suffer continual food shortages during their lives. Yes, poorer countries are currently experiencing terrible famines. Yes, poorer folks in developed countries still do not eat well or eat enough, but overall most folks here at least are overfed if anything. Here in the US we mostly have plenty to eat and more.

Unfortunately, because we live in the midst of this plenty, Americans waste huge amounts of food as a matter of course. Our family was no different until recently. I'm still working to get a handle on reducing the amount of food that goes to waste here. Working on my Druid First Degree has helped me to become more aware of the overall cost of what we eat and what we use. Not the monetary cost, per se, but the cost to the planet and to others who live here. It now seems sacrilege to me to throw even small amounts of food away - especially given the high environmental cost of producing it and given that so many people in the world are starving while we throw so much food away here in this country as well as burn tons of it in our gas tanks as ethanol. Because of our wasteful habits and addiction to driving long distances, people who used to buy our "surplus" commodities are going to soon be in dire straits as less and less of it becomes available for sale on the international markets. The thought of some day burning corn-based fuel in my gas tank that could have been used instead to keep small children alive somewhere is upsetting to me, so we're working on drastically cutting down the amount of extra driving we do now.

I guess there's no real purpose to this post, just a general kvetching about things that I cannot change. But at least I can see that things are changing, and because I can see I can make some adjustments to change how I live now. That's about all one can do, I suppose.