DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Much of the food we buy at Trader Joe’s is sold in bulk, by weight. For example: 16 oz. of organic granola costs $2.29. I got to wondering what the overall cost of food is, per pound. We know how much we spend on groceries, so I was thinking that if we could translate that to a weight, our weekly shopping task might be easier. For example, we wouldn’t need to go to all the tedium of making shopping lists. Rather, we could just pick up 97 pounds of food. Maybe some day in the future, groceries could be ordered this way via phone: “Hi, Mr. McGlynn. Another 97 lbs of food this week? We’ll have that delivered this afternoon.”

So I put all the groceries on the scale and added them up. Our 97 lbs of food cost me $147, or about $1.50 per pound.

I’m sure there are regional differences, but I’m sure there are dietary differences too. For example, we paid $3.29 for 3 oz. of proscuitto. If you had a jones for proscuitto, your groceries would cost you a lot more than $1.50/lb.

The other end of the food-cost spectrum is populated by healthy, or at least dense, choices like organic tofu (87¢/lb). Then again, a pound of organic raw almond butter set me back $7.99, which sort of blows this theory. Also: I’m not very fond of tofu.

Still, I’m picturing drive-through grocery stores. I’d drive there in a pickup truck, position the bed below a chute and enter a pound weight and my ATM pin into the keypad. With a loud thump, 97 lbs. of groceries would drop into the bed. This could be a great time-saver.