Re: NYC food - was Food costs.

[Guest guest]

At 02:57 PM 1/10/05 -0500, you wrote:

>Huh, you pay by the pound? Interesting. At the moment I'm getting

>pasteurized grass-fed heavy cream (probably just 35% fat) for

>$3.99/pint. Bleck. I'm trying to line up a new raw source which might be

>a little cheaper and also a lot better, but we'll see.

Actually, , living where you live, I'm amazed at your ability to come

up with what you do. How many years have you spent finding sources for

this stuff? How much of it are you actually able to get fairly locally

(either from a farm or a local supplier) v. ordering online/shipped?

How do the costs compare? As in, are there things that you've found are

better and cheaper to get via mail order kinda thing.

It took me about a year and a half of looking for various sources for

various items to get to my current state - all my needs are accounted for,

from reputable and tested sources, for pretty decent prices. Then again,

I don't have the dietary variety that you do, either (like dried salmon roe

hehe).

MFJ

Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or

kings - stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once

again. ~Greg Bear

[Guest guest]

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>Actually, , living where you live, I'm amazed at your ability to come

>up with what you do. How many years have you spent finding sources for

>this stuff?

Well, I've been living here for 3 1/2 years, but I don't know how much of

that time I've spent hunting for food. 3 1/4 maybe? <g>

>How much of it are you actually able to get fairly locally

>(either from a farm or a local supplier) v. ordering online/shipped?

Hard to say. I'm about to mail-order a split quarter of beef, but it's

pretty local, and it might be cheaper to rent a car and pick it up, so I

might do that. (It's in NJ.) OTOH I got a lot of pork recently for

sausage from a farm in Tennessee, just because I know the farmers and their

pork is top-notch. It's a real risk buying from a new place, since so many

farms produce meat that isn't very good and use processors which just plain

suck. I tried a couple steaks from the NJ place first just to be sure, and

even so, I think it's $4.75 a pound when buying a quarter, so it's not

nearly as cheap as I'd like. (Being in the northeast, that's a common

complaint.)

>How do the costs compare? As in, are there things that you've found are

>better and cheaper to get via mail order kinda thing.

Yeah, meat is often a lot cheaper mail order, speciality items are either

cheaper mail order or entirely unavailable in stores, but the farmers

market does help, even my favorite farms aren't all there on the same day,

unfortunately. (The Union Square market I go to is open Monday, Wednesday,

Friday, and Saturday. Lately I've been going on Saturday because it's the

biggest day, but Wednesday and Friday both offer a couple unique worthwhile

farms.)

-

[Guest guest]

[ wrote]

> (The Union Square market I go to

I got my very first taste of grass fed beef from a vendor in the Union

Square market about a year and half ago. I was visiting the city and

decided to check out the market on the day I was leaving. There was a

vendor from somewhere in Pennsylvania who was selling bison and beef. I

bought a few steaks and took them home with me.

Let me just say that it was a very interesting experience. Not quite

tenderloin from Whole Foods. Started me down the path, though. This was

before I had read NAPD or knew much about NT (even though I had had the book

for a couple of years).

Come to think of it, I also had my first taste of wheat grass juice that

day. Even though I had been juicing off and on for at least 15 years I had

never had wheat grass juice. My centrifugal juicer will not process it. I

can still see the wheat grass people and their pallets of beautiful green

wheat grass.

Ron