Supermarket Secrets revealed?

funkymonkey

my situation cant be unique - im a student but i take home around 1000 a month in wages ( ok so thats unique but the rest isnt!)

me and my partner are in loads of debt and are paying them off really well (snowballing)

i just often wonder wether i should be eating healthily and be buying lots of organics and free range chickens etc or wether i should be buying the cheapest and paying off my debts quicker.

its a tough choice. it cant be good for me eating all these foods full of pesticides and antibiotics etc but then maybee we can just detox on organics in three years time lol.

squeaky

As we say many times in many way's it's down to you to choose what suits you best. We're not going to tell you what to do but we'll give you plenty of ideas between us and, in doing so, posters will often tell you what they have chosen to do.

Finding a balance between what you can live with and what you can afford, and finding a way that is reasonably painless, both economically and ethically acceptable, is the best advice I can give you.

tru

I went to Tesco yesterday afternoon, headed straight for the fridges, my suspicions were correct, loads of chickens and drumsticks etc on the shelves I stayed there for a minute (sad person that I am) to see if anyone picked any up and no-one did, they walked straight past. How long will that last though? People will soon forget and start buying them again........

leonie_2

Its all very well though saying support your local butcher. Does anyone remember my problem with the well respected local butcher in my town? I had a thread on here about it and basically the butcher told me the eggs were free range and it turns out they were battery eggs!

If he is able to get away with things like that, I worry about the quality of his meat. I've certainly not shopped there again.

pol

Nearlyrich,

I live just down the road from Bury and would like to know somewhere you could recommend for good meat please.

A lot of the butchers near me are halal, so I normally travel to Halifax for my meat, but I would like to find somewhere closer, and seeing as I go to Bury every couple of weeks anyway.....

thanks

pol

squeaky

You could try putting your post code into www.bigbarn.co.uk to find suppliers near you...

chrislee765

Thanks squeaky im going to make a visit next week to my local free range meat producer, im not sure what prices will be like but its certainly going to be worth it!

raeble

leonie wrote:

Its all very well though saying support your local butcher. Does anyone remember my problem with the well respected local butcher in my town? I had a thread on here about it and basically the butcher told me the eggs were free range and it turns out they were battery eggs!

If he is able to get away with things like that, I worry about the quality of his meat. I've certainly not shopped there again.

He's not the only one that has done that sort of thing. I've seen tv programs that have shown the conditions that some so called free range chickens are kept in and frankly they would have been better off in battery farms - at least in those farms they had room to move. Not a lot but they still had some unlike the so called free range. A few supermarkets got their hands slapped a while back for being misleading in their free ranged eggs. Hence I don't trust any supermarket when it comes to free-ranged eggs. I'll buy the cheap eggs because they haven't proven to my satisfaction that the free ranged birds are treated any better to justify the hefty price tag.

When the farmers market comes to town I buy my eggs direct from the farmers and they look better than the supermarket eggs I've seen. Bigger as well.

Ticklemouse

Has anyone seen this month's Which magazine? It has a 4 page article about supermarket practises. I knew about some of them - putting the expensive brands at eye level and the value ones out of the way, also 'special offer' packs being more expensive per unit that different sized packs. I also knew that they laid out the store in a certain way in order to manipulate the way we think about our shopping ie browsing areas to the right of the door, to slow us down and get us in the mood for impulse buying, fruit and veg near the start so we feel healthy and virtuous,, stuff they want to 'push' on the aisle ends, etc

I didn't know that we read shelves from left to right (obvious really, but who's ever thought about it, apart from the shops) so they put the expensive and premium brands on the right as our eyes naturally linger there.

So, as Sarahsaver once advocated i think, when you do go to the supermarket, go to the far back and work round the wrong way - you may be surprised how much else you DON'T buy

THIRZAH

Pol-I don't know how far you are from Glossop but if you have transport you might try Mettricks in the High St. They still have their own abbatoir and most if not all of the meat is local.