Navigating the Grocery Store: Review of "Rich Food Poor Food"

Grocery shopping is often a dreaded weekly event. It takes time. It costs lots of money. It's overwhelming to figure out how to choose healthy foods that are also easy to serve. It requires work to put food away when you get home. And, inevitably, despite careful planning, you forget something!

Jayson Calton and Mira Calton have written a book that they claim will help make your grocery shopping easier.  Their tagline is: The Ultimate Grocery Purchasing System (GPS). Shop Smart, Shop Healthy, Save Time, Save Money, Avoid Hype and Harmful Ingredients.

So the question is: Should you take the time to read it?

The answer: It depends where you are at in your food journey.

If you have already been on your food journey for a while and have repeatedly made healthy food choices at the grocery store, have already watched documentaries about food, have read books about our food system, and have sought out certain brands because of their ingredients, then this book is not going to provide you any insight.

If you are brand new to your food journey, then this book is going to be overwhelming and confusing. Before you read this book, you should already know that certain ingredients are unhealthy and certain growing practices are unhealthy for the earth, the farmer, and your body. To be interested in the shopping methods of this book, you need to agree that not all foods are created equal and have a baseline understanding of why.

If you are in the middle of your food journey, then this book might be helpful to you because:
1. It identifies brands to look for in the grocery store and explains why those brands are healthier choices than others.
2. It briefly discusses why some ingredients should be avoided without overwhelming the reader.
3. It breaks the book into food categories which allows the reader to make one change at a time in their grocery shopping behavior.
4. It explains the differences between organic, non-organic, GMO, conventional, cage-free, grass-fed, antibiotic free, etc for each category of food.

If you've read this book, please let share your thoughts about how it was or wasn't helpful.