On Grocery Shopping

I love grocery shopping. I love the reading the labels, doing the math to comparison shop, finding the best products at reasonable prices, smelling the produce... I love it all. Truth be told, it exhausts me thoroughly. I must plan an entire evening (or afternoon on the weekend) to do simple weekly-type grocery shopping.

Wow, writing that down makes it sound pitiful.

I do it because I like to think about what I eat and what fuels my body every day. Also, because I haven't really figured out a way to avoid it and still get the products I want and need. I always have a list in hand (I love the meal planning and list generation on the Allrecipes Menu Planner.) and try to shop in a strategic way by grouping items by general location in the store, with dairy and frozen items going last if possible.

This obviously mitigates some of the exhaustion of having to walk back and forth up and down trying to find things. I also find it important to think logically about where things might be before I go on a massive aisle-by-aisle search for that one missing item. I've also learned to just give up. Scouring the 3 different possible locations for ricotta cheese sometimes just isn't worth it.

I think some of my attachment to grocery shopping came from watching Supermarket Sweep. I seriously love it as an activity, but it's one of the saddest for me because it is so tiring.