Getting your 5 a day

What a beautiful bounty of goodness!

There is often a lot of hype in the media about the rising cost of food - and yes this does seem to be the case. I've been trying to keep to a strict budget, and despite not buying extravagant items, I seem to come out of the supermarket with very few bags containing not very much at all!
Despite this - I will ALWAYS make sure that fruit & veggies are a food shop priority, and that there is no excuse to not be able to include them. I do not agree with the same hype about people not being able to afford fruit & veg, opting instead for takeaways and fast food - particularly in the Auckland area.

This morning was spent @ Avondale market - (in West Auckland), all of the above was purchased for $20! That will be enough for me and my partner for the week, we cook everything from scratch.

If we had more than two mouths to feed we would have got a whole lot more for that dollar if we'd opted instead for the sacks of produce that were available - i.e. : onions, apples, potatoes etc, which we found were often less than $5 each!

There is no excuse to not eat well.

The added bonus of going to a market for your food shop is the experience overall; it connects you to the food you eat - you can see what you are buying in its raw state, choose what you want, chat to the stall vendors as to how to cook it (which is awesome at Avondale which has an ethically diverse range of goodies), compared to buying it take-away where it is packaged in plastic all ready to go, where you have no real concept of how it was cooked or what's really in it.

There is a distinct lack of love in take-away processed foods - it is quite literally 'taken away'; there is no nourishment, it is disconnected.

I encourage all people to eat fresh, to buy from markets, and support local produce and local trade. Food is what nourishes us,  fuels us, and brings people together - what better way to treat yourself?! Not by having take-aways that's for sure...