Trader Joe, Trader Joe, wherefore art thou, Trader Joe?

I’ve put off grocery shopping yet again so I had no breakfast this morning. I didn’t have anything on hand yesterday, either, so I went to McDonald’s for an egg McMuffin, hash brown, & OJ. Not an ideal breakfast but not too bad, really. This morning I was running pretty late and didn’t want to do Mickey D’s two days in a row so I decided to hit up the new CVS across the street from work. I was just going to say “Fuck it” and get some Hostess mini donuts and diet soda – breakfast of champions! – but guess which donuts they DIDN’T have? The ones I wanted! I pondered the Honey Buns but couldn’t bring myself to do it, the oily condensation on the inside of the wrapper grossed me out too much.

In the end, I didn’t do too bad: a mini container of Honey Nut Cheerios with 1% milk, fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt, a Luna bar (always stashed at my desk), and a small bag of this weird popcorn/puffed whole grain cereal honey cluster thing for a snack later on. So I ended up making some halfway healthful decisions, even though it was a little too much sugar for me.

Still, it took some back-and-forthing through the aisles of CVS to pull that off, about as long as it would have taken to hit up a drive through. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be more difficult to eat healthily in Connecticut than in North Carolina! It’s not like I lived in some cool hippy town like Asheville or Boone, Wilmington is only marginally cool, and Carolina Beach is like a cool, not-too-scuzzy dive bar (the BEST kind of dive bar, which will remain dear to my heart for all eternity). I don’t suffer any illusions about Waterbury but come on, do I really have to travel a minimum of 10 miles just to get to decent grocery store? Not even a cool one, I’m talking your average run-of-the-mill chain (Big Y’s my favorite); the cool ones are 30-40 miles away, and that just ain’t happening given my current car situation.

Walking back to my car in the CVS parking lot, it dawned on me that in LA it’ll be SO EASY to eat the way I want, since there’s a Whole Foods and/or Trader Joe’s in practically every neighborhood. I really think that I’ve learned enough, and have made significant enough changes in how I shop & eat, that minus the accessibility obstacles I’m dealing with now, I can really fine-tune my day-to-day eating.

Just one more reason to keep my eyes on that western horizon…