Good deals on food
 

SU's post on wine prices made me think of good deals I've gotten on food products. Some of the biggest finds can be found at Trader Joe's. If you can tolerate the smell of hippies, there really is some great stuff there. One of my favorite products is a frozen bag of 3-Pepper blend (yellow, red and orange)for less than 2 dollars. You can put it in almost any meal you're preparing to add a little variety, flavor and color.

Those who live in Salt Lake should check out the Ghetto Mart, in the Glendale area just off of the 215. Sorry that I don't know its real name. They sell supermarket rejects for cheap, meaning food that has expired, is in dented cans or torn packaging.

In the fall of 2004, my roommate showed me his latest purchase: a half gallon of Dreyers NFL Blitz ice cream for 50 cents. On the side of the carton was the Arizona Cardinals' 2002 schedule.

LOL. In our old neighborhood we used to go to this place called Madison Market not far from downtown. It's kind of a local smaller scale Whole Foods, touting all organically grown stuff; there are rows upon rows of off branded whole wheat pasta, organic sesame oils, wheat germ, etc. The magazine racks are laden with "Mother Earth," "The Nation," etc. You tell the checkers you want "plastic" and they look at you like you're a mass murderer. Then the checkers and stockers are covered with tatoos and piercings, their skin is this waxy pallor, dark circles under their eyes, bones about to burst through their skins, etc.

If it's purchased from a store run by hippies or frequented by hippies, are you sure that 3-pepper blend is really pepper?

My family and I were recently in Taos New Mexico. After visiting the pueblo there (which I highly recommend, btw) we were hungry and wanted a small snack (I for one, was dying for a diet vanilla Cherry Dr. Pepper) so we pulled into the parking lot of this large store, not quite a supermarket but pretty large. We walk in and there is this table out front promoting some political cause involving Tibet. Unusual I think. We go in and the entire store is organic. There is nothing that isn't organic. There are no sodas. No candy bars. No ice cream bars. No donuts. No cookies. No fruit pies. No chips (except for these blue unsalted things that looked like cardboard wafers and cost twice as much as doritos). Everybody there is either unkempt and under 30 years old or gray haired with ponytails. The 5 of us are wandering around, strangers in a strange land, looking for something good, which our fellow shoppers would probably consider poison, all the while being stared and glared at in every aisle. My youngest finally finds some chocolate milk (as opposed to chocol;ate soy milk and rice milk) and we take 5 of the 6 bottles they had. For food we were pretty much left to Clif Bars and the like, as nothing else had enough fat or sugar to sustain one of us, let alone all of us.

It was a truly hippie dippie experience.

We have Trader Joes around here, btw, and they are very middle class, no hippie taint whatsoever.

I went to this place I talked about called Madison Market in search of ice cream once. Nothing that wasn't soy. Nada. Very frustrating.

The type of hippie you're referring to is quite common in the Pacific Northwest. It's a hybrid 90's grunge hippie and vegan hippie. Their education level isn't sufficient to allow them to converse with the average human being, so interaction is typically accomplished using non-verbal cues. This, combined with their practice of only eating rotted organic fruit, makes them ultimately harmless.

Here in Ohio we have a strain of hippie that is part liberal-arts-college-know-it-all hippie and leave corporate-America-move-to-the-fertile-Midwest type hippie. This type is to be avoided at all costs. Their smell is obnoxious (patchouli mixed with organic gardening) and they aggressively initiate conversation. If one believed that Marx really had it right, this wouldn't be so unpleasant. But with this group of hippies, engaging in conversation is worse than drinking a gallon of wheatgrass.

In California we had that kind of a store it was called the Grocery Outlet. I think I saw one here in Salt Lake at about 40th south and Redwood Road. I've never been there, but have driven past it. I wonder if it is still there?