Yes, Whole Foods is Expensive . . .

Greetings, fair maidens. Before I put up a post on the Fed's plan to purchase treasuries and why some say this could lead to hyperinflation, I thought I'd return to the milder (but not by much) topics of BPA, antibiotics, and hormones.
Our family recently invested in a "cooler" (dispenser?) for our bottled water. The water is held in a stainless steel reservoir rather than a plastic one. And the water comes in GLASS bottles, bottled by Mountain Valley Spring Water. Of course I researched it to death: Mountain Valley takes care to hold the water in stainless steel holding tanks before bottling it and NOT in plastic.

Do I use my coffee maker any more, which boils the water in plastic? Hell no. It's a stainless steel electric tea kettle for me. Call me eccentric, call me paranoid. It's okay. You won't hurt my feelings.
But I must say, in this age of salmonella we're learning more and more about our country's mass food distribution system and it ain't pretty.

This article on the amount of antibiotics found in local groundwater near large dairy farms gave me the creeps. Just think of the antibiotics in the meat and poultry we eat.
And of course we still have the problem of pthalates and precocious puberty, not to mention the hormones we feed to cattle (and poultry), hormones we and our children end up eating, too.
(As an aside, a neighbor of mine remarked, "but don't you find that free-range, grass-fed, no-hormone chicken a little gamey and well, just not as plump and delicious?" Short answer? No. It's even tastier. And I've gotten to where I can tell if it's the good stuff, just by smelling it.)

Caveat: I follow my mother's "speckled-pan" recipe: rub the well-washed (and well-dried) chicken with softened butter. Then sprinkle salt, pepper, garlic salt and lime juice all over it. Put it in the oven, covered, for 1 hour at 350F. Then put it back in, UNCOVERED, for another 30 minutes after you've basted it in the drippings. Before serving, add rice and a few sauteed mushrooms, and the dish is superb. (I bought my lidded speckled pan at Target for about $5.00, FYI.)
The best advice I've seen is to shop only the perimeter of the grocery, avoiding the aisles completely (unless you're picking up dog food or tampons, in which case you should be at Costco or Target, anyway).
And buy organic whenever you can afford it. As for fresh veggies and fruits, if you don't think you can cook or eat them fast enough before they go bad, buy frozen organic veggies and fruits. With frozen foodstuffs, you avoid the BPA lining in the cans altogether.
So, cheers. I'll be back in a bit, after a glass of organic white wine. Okay, not true. It's not organic. But it did come in glass!
P.S.: to get through this last video, you'll definitely need a glass of . . . something.

Labels: Antibiotics, Glass-Bottled Water, Hormones, Mountain Valley Spring Water, Organic, Precocious Puberty, Salmonella, Whole Foods