Day 7

I was so excited to start my last day of this challenge. Although I didn’t eat 100% local for the week, it was still very difficult to find and prepare an entirely local diet. I started the week thinking that this wouldn’t be that much of a challenge, especially because of where I lived. I was wrong, specifically with breakfast and being able to find local food in the U District. This week has really opened my mind and demonstrated several of the issues that we discussed in class.

I ended my week with a trip to the local Safeway store to finish my comparison of the prices of spinach. All of the prices were for the same product, organic spinach at roughly the same amount, ~1lb. The priciest was at Safeway, with $5.99. With was amazing to me, but then again it makes sense in the idea of price mark-up. The spinach at Carpinito’s never changed hands, the grower was the seller. The Whole Foods seemed to change hands several more time because the sellers didn’t grown their produce. Lastly, the most expensive seemed to change hands the most being picked, packaged, stocked and then finally sold. These different price levels make sense when one looks at the number of times the product was marked-up on the way to the shelf.

The price difference between the Carpinito's and the Whole Foods spinach is 800%...i was astonished. The idea that a vegetable could fall victim to the same comodification as we have talked about with coffee and chocolate.
Today for dinner I had my first local steak...i let it cook for too long but it was still fantastic.