Grocery Food and Habitual Food

In class, i realized that i do not eat a lot of fruits. In total, i eat one, and that is an apple. My mother eats several kinds of fruit, and my sister eats bananas, but i take after my father, and don't eat a lot of different kind of fruits. However, i do eat several vegetables including potatoes, lettuce (in my salad), garlic (my mom puts it in our dinner as a spice), and onion (also included as a spice in our dinners). I eat several roots, grains, and nuts also, including wheat, potatoes, garlic, and onion. I realized that my family does not eat a lot of these types of foods, instead we eat a lot of meat. Practically every meal my family has for dinner includes meat as an entree. Occasionally we have vegetables as an an entree, but it doesn't occur very often. When going to grocery stores, my mother tends to buy a lot of vegetables that she can put into our food. For example, when we are eating Stew, she buys a lot of squash, carrots, and potatoes. We only go to the grocery store when we need something, but for major stuff that my Mom likes to buy ahead of time, like meat, she buys in supermarkets. Usually my sister or I go out to the grocery store to buy the food we need.

While at the grocery store, we noticed a lot of things. We chose to observe a shelf that contained all Nabisco cookies, including Oreo, Chips Ahoy, and Ritz crackers. While looking at the cookies, we noticed that all the healthy cookies were on the top shelves, far from children’s reach. These cookies consisted of Wheat Thins and multigrain crackers. Right in the middle shelves was the colorful products, and the sweetest. These were the Chips Ahoy and the Oreo cookies. There were at perfect eye distance for a child to see it, and grab it. The packages were also brightly colored, with variations of pink, green, and blue on them. This made us come to the conclusion that the manufactures were catering to children’s eyes, and by using bright colors, it will draw the child in. The healthy crackers were on the top shelves because instead of trying to push these products, the store wanted to push the unhealthy, more expensive, cookies. In the left-hand corner of the cookie shelf were rice cakes. They were in their own secluded section, as if they didn’t matter very much. Since rice cakes are healthy, one might think that a store would want to advertise them more. In this case, it wasn’t true. One thing I noticed about the way the grocery store displayed their products was they always put the brand name in front, and the nutrition facts were hidden in the back, as if to hide these facts from the public eye. The brands and images of the products were most likely to draw a person in, rather than nutrition facts, which might be a big turnoff. The prices were also hidden pretty well, in a little section underneath the product. This was because the store didn’t want people to care about how much an item costs, rather how nice that item looks or how good that item tastes. This trip was an interesting experience, because when I go to the grocery store I hardly think about the way they display their products. I tend to know what I want, and go straight for that item. I don’t count the number of brand a certain product has, which in the case of the Oreo and Chip Ahoy cookies, there were several different kinds.