Otherwise entitled: Why I can’t shop at Aldi…
Yup! You can call me yet another crunchy name…I am Michelle and I am a label reader. I read every label for every product that my husband and children (and me) eat, drink, spray, squeeze – you name it. If it somehow gets absorbed by our bodies – I read the label before I buy it. This tends to drive my husband crazy if he’s with me on a trip to Wal-Mart. Fortunately, I know most of my preferred brands and I can pluck them off the shelves without reading the labels.
Now, lest you think that this somehow turns our grocery bill into thousands of dollars each month – you would be very wrong. I read all the labels, buy appropriate products and still keep our groceries (including paper products and cleaning supplies and other miscellany) to between $600-$800 per month. I can do it on less than $400, but I choose not to because there are some things we like to have around and some convenience foods that make my life easier – especially with morning sickness coming on strong.
So, why can’t I shop at Aldi? Well, we went to Aldi last week. I had heard so many great things about it and being one that could care less about brand names, I thought I’d check it out. Unfortunately, every other item I picked up had HFCS as one of its main ingredients. Contrary to what the corn board or whoever they are would like you to think High Fructose Corn Syrup is very bad for you. It encourages obesity and if you need more convincing, go here because I don’t want to write a whole article on it right now! Most of Aldi’s foods also contained MSG which I won’t tolerate. I did pick up some tuna fish and some canned wild salmon, so that was a bit of a bargain. I believe we found a good deal on potatoes. But their cereal, oatmeal (except the regular oats), even their canned soup – all had either MSG or HFCS or worse! I simply won’t tolerate those ingredients in my children’s food.
I generally keep to the rule that if it didn’t grow in the ground, get picked from a tree or eat from the ground, then I won’t eat it. I also try and keep words I can’t pronounce out of my diet! Occasionally – I will cave at the Wonderbread thrift store and buy the 3 for $5 boxes of Ho Ho’s – because, who doesn’t love a Ho Ho? But I justify this by thinking that if I keep all of the rest of the crap out of our bodies most of the time, perhaps we can tolerate an odd Ho Ho once in a while!
I’m disgusted, really, with the choices at the store that are considered food. Sidenote: I also don’t buy “processed cheese food” because if they have to tell me it’s food, I’m guessing it just might not be! I’m encouraged that there are alternatives to the chemical-laden crap that is in most food and that I can find it at a place like Wal-Mart because I really do hate traveling to 4 different stores each week.
Some things are more expensive – like good bread (when I don’t want to bake it myself) and whole grain flour instead of bleached – but overall, our budget is sound. We cook from scratch and eat healthy and well.
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