Farmers Market Experiment: Week 1

Got to the Studio City Farmers Market bright and early this morning and scoped things out. Several stands had signs that said "CHERRIES NEXT WEEK" - yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy! Anyway, to the results of the experiment. I should say that for the past several weeks I've been buying both strawberries and sugar snap peas at the market already. So, for about $22.50, I got the berries and peas, I got everything in the picture below: lettuce, red cabbage, snap peas, strawberries, tons of tomatoes, grapefruit, and a cucumber. Not everything is Organic, but I don't care that much about that. It's all pesticide-free, which is what I care about.

Now to be fair, I didn't buy much fruit because I have some oranges from last week's shopping still in the fridge. But they are California oranges so I don't feel badly about still eating them in this experiment. I definitely got less for the money, but I also didn't buy stuff I don't need that's out of season and probably full of pesticides and god knows what else, like Chilean grapes and Mexican pineapples. I was surprised that I couldn't find ANY bell peppers at the market; that's the one thing I would have really wanted that I couldn't find. But I don't normally put tomato in my lunch salad, so I figured I would replace the bell pepper with some tomato. I was paying 2.99/lb for the Mexican bell peppers anyway, so the tomatoes barely even cost more.

So, considering the $22.50 included the peas and strawberries (which together total a good 1/3 of that $22.50), I actually spent LESS on produce this week than I have been spending a lot of recent weeks. Some things, like the grapefruits at 2 for a dollar, and snap peas at $4/lb were the same or almost the same price as Jon's. Because of all that, I will declare Week 1 a rousing success. 

I also bought about a pound and a half of grass-fed skirt steak. It was their last 2 packages and I was there at 8:15am!! It's beautiful-looking meat. For $14.00 I got 6 dinners worth. For that quality, not bad at all. One of the packages was so fresh that it wasn't even frozen.

We'll see what happens next week!