They say you gotta eat to live, but with the cost of food rapidly increasing, it’s getting more and more difficult to make healthy choices in the grocery store aisles.
The joke circulating on social media this week is you have to take out a loan just to afford a head of cauliflower—which is running between $8 and $13 in Jasper—and, although it’s comical, the sad part is that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
And it’s not just cauliflower, either, it’s grapes, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados and other fresh produce. It’s getting so bad that people are actually taking pictures of price tags and posting them on social media, questioning how anyone could afford $28 a pound for wilting asparagus.
It’s beginning to feel a bit like we’re living in the Canadian Arctic where a one-litre jug of orange juice is a $23 hit on your grocery bill. About once a year, news reaches the southern provinces of the exorbitant grocery prices in the territories and we’re all appalled, but we seem to be catching up.
With the Canadian dollar plummeting, floods destroying crops in California and Mexico and most food production taking place outside Canada’s borders, our local stores don’t have much choice in what they’re charging and, as such, we don’t have much choice in what we’re paying.
In our office we’ve complained about the price of cheese in Jasper’s grocery stores for years, always giving each other the heads up when there’s a sale, but now those nudges are coming for other grocery items as well.
“Bags of gala apples are on sale—go, go, go!”
Don’t be surprised if you see the four of us, en mass, making our way to the grocery store to greedily stock up on sale items; that’s just what it’s come to.
Living in a rural community, there is already an expectation that the cost of groceries will be inflated, but with external forces causing them to skyrocket, soon most Jasperites won’t be able to afford to eat fresh food and will instead be forced to fill their carts with Kraft Dinner and Chef Boyardee.
The president of one of Canada’ largest grocery chains said Canadians can expect to see high prices for at least another few weeks.
In the meantime, our only advice is to pick up a flyer and start meal planning around each week’s sales.
Perhaps we can start a Facebook group and share recipes.
Cabbage is always cheap. What goes well with cabbage?
