How to buy organic produce...and afford it!

We all want to eat more organic produce.  We can cite many reasons to want to make the switch; personal health, environmental preservation, better taste and nutrition rank among some of the most popular.  But even we struggle when we find ourselves wandering the grocery aisles.  Trying to rationalize the gross price discrepancies between organic and not is a tough task.

Mike and I often find ourselves in the produce section staring down a chemically sprayed pepper grown in a mono-crop system for $1.99/lb and an organic pepper, grown using sustainable methods for $5.99/lb.  It's a glaring financial difference, and while we definitely understand that organic produce takes more time and care to plant, maintain, grow, and harvest sometimes money wins. 


So, we stick to a few little strategies that makes the purchase of organic produce affordable AND  make us feel much better after a trip to the grocery store:

First, stop using plastic bags.  Seriously.  I think that this above all the other 'green' changes you can make is one of the most important.  I could write another whole post about the evils of plastic, but that's a topic for another day. In the meantime, consider a personal ban on plastic bags.  We bring our reusable grocery bags with us which are fine for transporting our food from store to car (bike, bus, train) to house.   But what about bagging individual produce like brussel sprouts, beans, etc. that are tough to carry loose in the cart?

We need to give up that waste too.  Use reusable grocery bags or just learn to deal with a "messy" cart.  When the clerk stares at your loose potatoes rolling down the conveyor belt, stare back at him.  If you feel you must, explain that you don't use plastic bags.  The clerk and the people waiting in line behind you might be a little annoyed, but they'll deal with it.  Now I know you don't directly save any money  by choosing to purchase these items loose, but without plastic bags and pre-weighed and printed price stickers (like they use at Wegmans) we're one step closer to discovering organic affordability.

This leads us to our next step, which we discovered totally by mistake but now make a practice.  Of course, pick the organic vegetable that looks best, but make sure it doesn't have a sticker.  You know, the little stickers with the 4-digit product code that the clerk uses to ring in the price at the register.  We've never had a hard time finding sticker-free food, and haven't yet gone so far as to peel the stickers off.  It may take a little extra time and work, but in that pile of organic sweet potatoes you will most certainly be able to paw through until you find all the potatoes you need without stickers.

Without the aid of a coded sticker when the clerk goes to weigh your produce,  he will never think to ask whether it's an organic potato or a caustic one.  In our experience, they will almost always use the cheaper, non-organic code to calculate the price.  Now pile all those veggies back into your reusable bags and you've not only saved money, you've also reduced waste.  If you then compost your food scraps from these veggies (hopefully for use in your home garden in the spring) then you're completing the life cycle of those vegetables as beneficially as you possibly can.  And that's really our goal here--to reshape the commercial, industrial systems at work in the grocery store and return them to a more natural, wholesome system.


I'm sure this topic could raise all kind of ethical debates on the merits of 'stealing' from Danny Wegman or whoever owns Whole Foods.  But as far as I'm concerned, the organic farmers are still getting paid and Danny Wegman isn't hard up for cash.  Until our garden thaws and can offer up fresh produce at an affordable price we will keep up my little routine and now you can too.