Grocery Haul: What ₳600 Gets You This Week
Grocery haul time. I do these because people keep asking what six hundred Alberta dollars actually buys these days, and also because looking at the receipt after the fact is somehow less painful than looking at it in the store, science should look into that.
Six hundred dollars got me, one rotisserie chicken, which we are stretching across three dinners, a bag of potatoes, a dozen eggs, two blocks of government cheese from the ration counter, a bag of the store brand cereal that the kids have accepted without complaint because they do not remember the other kind, a jug of milk, and some carrots that had definately seen better days but were the only carrots left.
I did not buy meat beyond the chicken. I did not buy fresh fruit, it was not in the budget this week, we will hear about vitamin C from somebody eventually I am sure. I did buy the good butter, once, as a treat, and I felt genuinely guilty about it the whole drive home, which tells you something about where we are at.
The cashier and I have a whole relationship at this point, we do not really talk, we just make eye contact when the total comes up and both sort of nod, like, yeah, this again.
Seven kids ate off this haul for the week, stretched thin, supplemented with whatever the garden still has going, which by this time of year is mostly potatoes and stubbornness.
If you want the honest version, groceries are the thing that keeps me up at night more than the border, more than the currency, more than any of it, because you can explain politics to a kid, its much harder to explain an empty fridge.