Adventures in Grocery Shopping!!

Today Vince, Olivia and I went grocery shopping.  I really hate to go grocery shopping.  Usually there's some kind of catastrophe involving one of my children, it takes way too long and I hate how much money I spend in an hour.  My new friend, vine.com, is helping decrease the amount of time I need to spend in the grocery store, but it's still a chore I do weekly.  Each week I plan a menu for the week.  I look at the calendar, plan around after-school activities (which days will I have a lot of prep time, which days require that there's little clean-up, etc) and draft a menu and corresponding grocery list.  Then I shop. 
Vince has discovered the Eagle's Nest at Giant Eagle.  The bigger kids loved to go there, but he wasn't able to go in until he was 3.  Now he found that they have TONS of superhero guys and he will actually ASK to go to the grocery store throughout the week when he's bored playing with his guys and wants to go and play with the ones they have there.  For some bizzare reason, the Eagle's Nest doesn't open until 11AM.  Like me, I would think most mothers of younger children would be grocery shopping before mid-afternoon naps and an hour before it's time to eat lunch, but I'm sure Giant Eagle has their reasons.  So we had to go to the Raisin Rack first today.  (I don't generally like to do this because I buy more at the Raisin Rack and I hate to leave my groceries sitting in the car while I'm in the other store.)  It was actually a smooth trip.  Vince did insist on getting coconut milk ice cream bars, but I'll take that over the $15 organic candy canes we fought over last Christmas.  I was looking at the frozen fish section (the kids don't really like fish fillets and I was looking for Dr. Praeger's potato crusted fish nuggets, hoping the fish shape might be too fun to pass up).  An older man and an employee came over and I was eavesdropping on their conversation, (No Evan, I was NOT staring!)  The man must have been following a diet that someone had suggested for him since the employee kept saying, "He probably won't want you to eat the processed fish substitute."  From what I could tell, they guy was trying to go vegan. (no animal or animal products).  I think it was really a jump for him because he was way confused about the veggie burgers the employee was showing him.  He kept asking if they were processed.  (And yes, Evan, I did actually say out loud, "Umm YES!" a little louder than I intended too, but I still don't think he heard me. I hope.)  I felt bad for him because he was making such a big jump in his diet, from not even realizing that a "fake" meatlike product (I'm not against veggie burgers, I eat them, but I realize that they're not the healthiest option I can choose) was processed.  I'm glad he's changing his diet.  I really think it's great that he's making the switch to a, in my opinion, healthier way of eating.  I just think it's sad that the "normal" way of eating is so far from the healthy diet that this poor guy was trying to follow that he was totally confused about something as simple as what to eat-something that should be so basic.

Now, I'm sure that this incident at the grocery store is in no way related to the book I started reading today, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser. I'm going to go ahead and apologize right now for talking about this book all the time.  I can tell it's going to be really interesting and I'm going to spare my poor family from constantly telling them the fun factoids (did you know there are more Americans in prison than there are farmers in the US?) and blog about it instead.

So, to you, strange man in the Raisin Rack, I say "Good Luck!"  I hope you're able to keep up with your vegan diet!  I'm sure you'll have a better chance than I would.  No one's putting yogurt-covered pretzels in YOUR cart!