Where's the Food?

A few days ago I needed to get something from Wal-Mart -- a store I normally avoid like the plague, but given the choice of driving to Tulsa or getting it there, I went to Wal-Mart. Since I was there already I thought I'd just go ahead and get the few other items on my list...

what a shocker. I wanted black-eyed peas and almost never buy canned, so went to the dried beans isle, where much to my surprise there were NONE. There were also no chickpeas, and very little of anything but pinto beans. The space for the dried beans also seemed much smaller.

Next shocker was the search for black olives and green chilis, only 2 brands offered (now I've heard for years, that canning companies typically use the same shipments of food for multiple labels, so I wasn't that surpised initially). So, I started looking around and realized that there were much fewer brands on the shelves, generally one 'store brand' and one name brand of many items and of those, the shelves didn't seem to be stocked nearly as full as what I remember from years ago.

By now, I was feeling very un-settled but wanted frozen peas to go with the new potatoes I had just bought from a local farm. Wow, was this sad to see, the frozen veggie isle was greatly reduced down to like 4 doors of stuff and very little was there in terms of variety. If I wasn't a longterm gardening catalog fan, I might not notice this as much, but if a person was to compare the number of veggies offered in the store to the vegetable seed varieties, and understood the limited nutritional options in the store, they might just get as upset as I was by that point.

It was a great reminder of why I want to garden in spite of the longterm comittment and day to day work involved. I want my kids to know what real food is and I want to nourish my family well for longterm health. Now back to working on fall gardening plans!