Bulk Food Makes Me Crazy

I suppose I should have thought about this before starting the blog, but Shannon and I don't really buy a lot of anything except food.  So I'm sure you've noticed that I do a lot of talking about food.

This post is no different.

Bulk Food Makes Me Crazy.

When I was a kid, bulk food made me crazy because my mom would spend forever in the bulk food aisles, picking out the cheapest stuff.  With no fancy packaging or bright colors, it was the most boring part of the whole grocery trip, which was already the most boring part of my whole life at that time.

When I grew up, bulk food made me crazy because I realized - as my mom had - that bulk food tends to be SO MUCH CHEAPER than the packaged stuff, and if you recycle the bags, there's less environmental impact!  Woot!

Now that I've started this Buying American experiment, bulk food makes me crazy because NONE of it has country of origin labeling!  Some has info on the distributor, but most of the time even that's missing.  Not only do I not know where any of the individual ingredients are from, but I can't even research where the ingredients were combined.  I want bulk food because it's cheap, but I don't have the time or energy to scour the internet for information that probably doesn't exist for public consumption.  At Life Source, the natural foods store in town, they at least say (sometimes) that distributor info is available by request, but as we've seen, that doesn't really help either.

Why, bulk foods?  WHY???