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Food for thought

I went to the supermarket yesterday to stock up on some essentials.

Smack my gob... prices are ridiculous!

Toilet paper cost me nearly $10.

A block of tasty cheese nearly $22.

Two litres of milk cost so much my eyes started to water.

Even good old beef mince (albeit not the 30% fat stuff) also well over $22 a kilo.

Don't even get me started on fruit and veg!

It looks as if those media reports claiming that food prices have risen faster than at any time in more than a decade are right on the money.

I eat a diet that is pretty high in protein (helps slow the Parkies progression) so I don't have a lot of alternatives for things like chicken, eggs, beef, cheese etc. Keeping chooks in suburbia is not a neighbour-friendly thing to do and the economics of raising your own animals on such a small scale is pretty doubtful anyway.

This means I'm pretty much going to be resigned to spending more of my hard-earned cash just to keep the fridge stocked.

On the subject of chicken... I have previously prefered the free-range birds but decided to try the budget version from Countdown last week. OMG! The difference utterly astonished me.

I'll admit that I now have almost no sense of taste so the texture of my food has become very important. The free-ranch chicken is very nice. Soft, succulent and pleasant to consume. The budget chicken was hideous. Not only were the breast fillets incredibly large (what are they feeding these animals?) but the flesh was really weird. When biting or chewing, it is initially quite resistant to pressure but then yeilds suddenly. It's not nice, not nice at all.

I can only think that these birds are really old laying hens that have reached the end of their productive lives as egg-makers and are then culled for budget chicken portions.

Thanks but no thanks... I'd rather eat canned tuna!

However, there has to be some way to reduce the cost of food for the average Kiwi family so once again I'm going to be ripping up a bit of the lawn to sow some seeds for summer.

When I look at just how expensive lettuce was last year I'm pretty sure I'll be laying down quite a few of these crunchy treats.

Previously, when lettuce sold for just $1-$2 it was simply not worth the money to grow your own but last year we were paying $5-$6 around here and at that price, a $5 pack of seeds turns into several hundred dollars worth of food in no time.

I'll probably throw in more salad veges, things like radishes, cucumbers and perhaps a tomato plant or two (have you seen the price for tomatoes recently... AAAARGH!).

Now it's just a case of finding the space for all this. Where we're living right now there's no real lawn that I could convert into garden but there is a patch of "waste" ground behind the garage. Unfortunately it's narrow and has a high garage wall on each side so will probably only get a few hours sunlight each day. Never the less, I'll give it a go and see how I get on.

How many readers are considering also growing their own produce this summer, in light of the stupid-silly prices we're probably going to have to pay at the markets or supermarket if we don't?

Carpe Diem folks!

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