We are really spoiled. Bloomington, IN has wonderful grocery stores.
Can you truly fill your basket in most small towns?
Our favorite is the local food co-op, Bloomingfoods. We have been members for a few years and enjoy the great value and selection that our store offers. They have organic milk, local eggs and produce, local baked goods and a new favorite-locally made tofu. They have three locations around town, so it is very easy for us to shop there. Even if we didn’t shop at the co-op, it would still be ridiculously easy for us to buy organic food in Bloomington. So easy, that we have started taking things like the beautiful Bloomington Farmers Market and large organic/natural food sections in our chain stores like Kroger and Marsh for granted.
That is until we moved into the RV park this summer. Hickory Hills Campground is just north of Spencer Indiana. For Jessika, it is a 40 minute commute from work. Because I work 10 miles north of Bloomington, I can’t stop by our beloved Bloomingfoods on my way home from work. I try to stock up on the weekends and always carry a cooler in my car so that I can tote my purchases home with me in the evenings. I take small country roads home. It really is a pleasant drive, but my only “grocery store” along the way is the Paragon Country Market, in Paragon Indiana. They sell gas out front and pizza in the back. Between these, the store is stocked with basic “staples” like corn dogs, ketchup, mac n cheese and canned meat. They do have a produce “section” which consists of one cooler in the back that holds two heads of iceberg lettuce, some celery and the occasional bag of oranges. This place is always busy and the people are nice. Everytime I am in line, someone is buying beef jerky, frozen dinners or corn dogs.
On the way home from work one night, I decided that I was going to make vegetarian sloppy joes. I had all of the ingredients on hand, except for the hamburger buns. I could have called Bryan to see if he could pick some up on his way home from Terre Haute, but he doesn’t pass any grocery stores either. So, I pulled into the Paragon Country Market. Surely they will have a wheat bun option, I thought. Remembering from earlier excursions that they had a “bread aisle.”
Oh...such crust on these buns!!
No luck. The bread aisle was just as utilitarian as the rest of the store. They had one brand of buns. Such Crust. I took a picture of the ingredients label so that you could see that the third ingredient was our friend High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Flour, water, SUGAR!!!
Desperate, I bought them. And darn it, they were really good. That guilty pleasure good, where you know you are going regret it later. They were soft, squishy and addictive (like corn dogs and cheese doodles and Hostess cupcakes). The one thing that they were not was healthy. Nothing in this store is. If we lived in Paragon, IN we would be hard pressed to fill our shopping cart with wholesome, whole foods. Unless of course, we grew/raised them ourselves. But that is what is frustrating. I take it for granted that wholesome, organic foods are just a few minutes away from me in Bloomington. This summer, it has been a whole different ballgame.
I am sure that many of the folks in these small, rural communities do grow some of their own food, but after that they are left with little choice. Spending my summer in an area where “real” food isn’t a convenient purchase really helped me appreciate the food that I am able to purchase on a daily basis.
By the way, the most popular item seen in peoples carts at the market? Corn dogs. (I know, I have mentioned them a couple of times in this post.) If only I still ate meat…