Grocery Cart Voyeur

Last night I went grocery shopping ALONE! As odd as this may sound, I actually find grocery shopping kind of relaxing when I don't have 3 kids in tow. I can price compare, read labels and use two hands to push the cart instead of hold a child with one, pushing the cart with one and begging the third to PLEASE get off the side of the cart because an additional 50 lbs on one side makes it REALLY hard to push, especially with one hand! After my relatively short shopping trip I realized that they only had two lines open, thank you Giant Eagle!, and I, of course, picked the wrong line. As I tire of reading the tabloid headlines (Brad is cheating! People has a picture of him touching another woman's ARM (which looks like it was done in passing, as if she had said, "I loved you in Twelve Monkeys!" and he squeezed her arm and said, "Thanks!")) I looked at what the family of four (with two kids that are WAY to big to be in one of those double carts---we're talking 3/4 graders!) was taking out of their cart. This now has my full attention. Chips, pop, pop, pop, chips, white bread, Sunny D (which I also overhead a boy telling his mom WAS TOO orange juice--because it had vitamin c!!) and if you can't tell from my tone already, I started to judge. I looked at the mom and dad. They looked reasonably intelligent, except for the part about letting those big kids ride in the double cart. Why were they putting all that JUNK into their bodies? At this point I realize I'm staring (my husband says this is a common problem for me) so I try to distract myself by looking somewhere else, which happens to be the cart of the guy behind me. OK, this guy was WAY worse! Frozen corn dogs, 2 gallons of conventional 2% milk, fruit loops, white bread, Hot Pockets...at first I thought he was a single guy (wearing scrubs, which leads me to believe he works in the medical field...shouldn't he have SOME idea about nutrition??) when a woman and two kids walk up behind him and start talking. This again distracts me and my eyes finally come to rest on my own cart. What do THEY see when they look at ME? This brings me down a notch. I like to think that I eat only healthy food, but when I look in my cart, it's not all fruits and veggies and whole grains, like I'd like it to be. (For the record I only do half my shopping at Giant Eagle, I get all my fruits, veggies, bulk grains and anything else I need that's organic at the Raisin Rack. ) I KNOW that I'm not even CLOSE to having the perfect diet, but like I've said, I'm doing the best I can. I guess my nosiness into my neighbor's carts isn't so much me feeling superior, it's really just a sadness that so many people don't know what's in their food and what that stuff in their food does, or doesn't do, for their body. For example the Fruit Loops. They say "with Whole Grains" on the box, which everyone knows is good for you, but if you look closely, they barely have enough whole grains to even count and the High Fructose Corn Syrup and dyes more than outweigh any benefit that the whole grains could be doing. It's just so frustrating to me that it's a FIGHT to eat REAL food! Is that REALLY so much to ask?!!