Can You Afford toEat???

 

 

Well it has been since Thanksgiving that I have written a commentary for your reading pleasure. I was raised under the adage that if you have nothing nice to say do not say anything. Well that is not what my commentary is about. I have tried to keep quiet but that is…well…impossible.

So after finishing my workout this morning I headed to the grocery store to pick up a cabbage, milk, and some ground beef. Seems simple enough right? No not at all. The price tag on these three simple items was over twelve dollars!!! I was stunned at the cash but not before I was hammered with the prices of the produce and the meat. I never shop the inside isles of the store as that is the junk food and the processed foods. As a Mom at home I have the opportunity to prepare wholesome meals and shop in the outside isles, so I do. I was making my rounds of the fresh produce only to notice that English cucumbers were $1.99 and were about eight inches in length and as skinny as a twig!!! Not only that, but, the price of a ham was $12.00. Less than a year ago the ham was $7.00 and the sale price was $3.99. Ground beef was another one. 500 g was $5.00 a week ago now it is $6.00 for the same amount, but still who can afford to eat right now?

 

 

We live in one of the largest food producing nations in the world. Our waste food is one third of what is grown in this country Canada and the farmers, producers and manufacturers of our food has the nerve to up the prices like that. My family spends about $800.00 per month on general food products from the grocery store. That does not include the extras such as the odd pizza or other celebratory meal out type of deal. For the most part we cannot afford to be eating out or ordering in food (neither can our health for that matter) so we stick to what we can buy from the grocery store or local farmers. So imagine my shock and horror as I walk the isles with my measly bi-weekly allowance and try to reconfigure our grocery list. I have cut out of our diet as much as I humanly can to manage our monthly budget. It is not as if my husband’s salary is going up to compensate for this financial grab by the food industry or as if I make any money from this blog. We are stuck now having to find what it is to give up next to make sure we have the right foods on the table for pure children to grow and be healthy.

 

Most of the food in this photo would have been wasted due to rotting.

Source: my local grocery store. I have observed and questioned.

 

Well as it stands right now, I make bread at home for a cost of $0.50 per loaf instead of paying over $2.00 for commercial bread. I make crackers, jellies, pickles, and just about every other condiment that you could want in your home including ketchup. I make my own soup stocks in order to lower our grocery bills we use every scrap of food that is bought and waste next to nothing to continue to lower this mandatory survival bill. We purchase nothing that is prepackaged or processed to yet again lower the bill. I price match and use coupons when I can (mainly for toiletries and items like that) yet again to lower the overall bill. So where does all of this give the audacity to the manufacturers and producers and sellers of our food to increase the cost to the point that we as an average family in Canada cannot afford to eat??? What gives you the right to be so financially greedy that you would and will stave people this year??? I know and am sympathetic to the circumstances of the lousy Ontario crops this past summer but really as I looked upon the elderly man in the store with me looking to his budget and trying to adjust his list so he could buy the meat he needed to survive my heart broke and my rage grew. There is no reason in this great country of Canada for anyone to be starving or having to make the choice between meat and heat. Ridiculous I say!!!

 

This is not the man I met at the store but a good representation of our aging population that will not be able to feed themselves.

 

You would think that after we as a country came together for our fallen soldiers over the past few weeks that we would be able to come together for our own countrymen. But I seem to think that this is an impossible task and that we are doomed by common human greed for money and that even as a country we will not all take a small part of the bite financially so that we can all ride this storm together and reach the light as a community we will do as any other place in the world would do, pass it all on to the consumer and let our tiny salaries, already squeezed dry, find a place to fit expenses that we are stuck paying just so we can live. Food is a basic need.

 

Food is a right not a privilege!!!

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