Shopping, Money and All That

Yesterday and today I've done the month's grocery shopping. Levor gets paid by the month and so we get the bulk of the food as soon as we get paid so we don't spend it on shiny things. We like shiny things.

I normally plan the menu for the month and then go to three supermarkets to get everything. The cheaper one has the basics, the next one up has more things I need and the expensive one has a huge variety of things I'm fussy about or can't get anywhere else. None of them however stock kitchen string. Not such a difficult thing, but there'll be no Christmas Pudding this year unless I can find some.

Apart from being a huge undertaking, it always makes me feel part of the economic machinery of modern society. I have no desire to return to the subsistence existence of prior centuries, where the kind of drought we are having in NSW at the moment would mean widespread death. I don't even really want to grow my own vegies. I mean, I like the idea but I'm fairly sure I'd be hopeless at it. Growing things see me and their motivation for living starts to elude them.

But I'm amazed at how much we - two people - eat in a month. When you carry it around, pack and unpack it and store it, you really start to notice it. Just storing it takes up so much space. And then in around 30 days it has mostly disappeared.

I also notice how much it costs. I think when you buy groceries weekly, you feel like you don't spend as much because you're parting with less money at each shop.

It's all made me realise more fully that:
1. The urban parts of our society are not self-sufficient. If there was a serious disruption to the economy, distribution services or something else essential for supermarkets to continue to function, then massive numbers of people would be in serious trouble. There simply isn't anywhere else to get food in a city.
2. We need a lot of money just to survive. Even the poorest in our society would need a certain amount of money just to keep eating because there isn't food anywhere else.

Today and yesterday's experiences have enlarged my sense of what I pray when I say: "Give us today our daily bread..." I'm glad God keeps providing food for me to eat.