Quinoa Sprouts and Kraft Macaroni

I ate quinoa sprouts for the first time today. I know some of you have heard of quinoa, and some of you have actually eaten it, too. Sprouting quinoa involved soaking it in water for a day, and then rinsing it three times daily for two more days, until it grew sprouts. I ate them on a salad with cold pressed olive oil and salt. They were magically, surpisingly delicious.

Coinciding with my quinoa sprouting experience today was an opportunity to buy groceries for a single mom of three young boys. I had forty of someone else's dollars to spend on groceries for Vicki* and I found myself in a quandary. Most of the emergency food provisions I've heard of people getting are canned or boxed goods--things like canned peas or potato flakes, peanut butter, and tuna. Forty dollars can buy a lot of canned peas at Aldi, but canned peas are not very nutritious. Neither is Kraft macaroni and cheese or peanut butter made with corn syrup or white bread. So the dilemma I faced was this: Do I use up the precious monetary resources on fewer items that contain more nutrients, or do I use those dollars to buy the largest amount of food possible, to fill those tummies as long as possibly can be filled. It felt like a toss-up. If I went for quantity over quality, those kids wouldn't necessarily be nourished even if they had something to put in their tummies. If I went for quality, at least they'd have a couple days of eating well, of low sugar-, hormones-, antibiotic-, and preservative-levels in their food. So, I did my best to walk the line between making the most out of those forty dollars and making the most out of the nutrition for Vicki and her boys for the next few days. I bought organic milk and hormone-free cheese. Those were almost twice the price of the conventionally processed products, but also the ones that, I felt, were worth the most money. I bought conventionally grown baby carrots and lettuce, but natural peanut butter (i.e. peanuts and salt--no corn syrup or sugar). I bought organic Raisin Bran (it was on sale! again, no corn syrup), conventionally grown oranges and organic bananas (organic bananas are cheap!), and sandwich ham and turkey that is processed without nitrates or sulfites. These were the sorts of foods Vicki had told me her children longed for. While I could have bought them two weeks worth of quinoa as well as most of those other groceries, I suspected Vicki and her family would neither appreciate or know what to do with quinoa. And while I valued nourishing their bodies, I also felt it important to meet the "felt" need her kids had, for familiar food, for something recognizable.

I'm sure one could scrutinize my decisions and see inconsistencies in them. I pretty much shopped with my heart, and avoided those products I think of as normally causing the most harm to people. Did I make the right choices? Just choices? I dont' know. Will Vicki and her family go back to eating typical emergency fare in a few days? I hope not.

*not her real name