Certainly, Whole Foods deals in producing organic/partly organic prepared food everyday, so it is not a prohibitive enterprise.

They also charge an arm and a leg for everything else in the store, though, so they're making up the loss by gouging me on crackers (I buy the identical brand of crackers at Target, of all places, for 1/3 the price.) Weirdly, I do get a brand of French cheese at WF for about $1.50 *less* per pound than at my local chain supermarket. That must be a first...

Does anyone have a notion of how much money they lose on wasted food? Or maybe a better question is how long they keep items in the prepared-foods case before they do toss it? I was in over the holidays when the turnover should have been very high, and spied some things that looked like they'd been made days before. Really unappetizing to look at, and by that point a breeding ground for bacteria (shrimp salad looking a little brown on the edges? I'll pass!)

Doesn't In-N-Out Burger out in California use natural (ie non processed) ingredients, bake their own bread, etc? I've only heard rumors about the glory of In-N-Out, but a friend just moved to SD so maybe if I visit him I'll get to experience it myself...

Make Home-Ec *mandatory* in high schools, and not the home-ec of the variety that I took (I learned on pain of severe scolding that a pancake turner was *not* a spatula, it was a "pancake turner" and nothing else. Nor are the rubber things that I use to get batter or sauces out of bowls, those are "rubber scrapers". Spatulas are the things you use to frost cakes. That, and how to make flower biscuits out of Pilsbury biscuts in a can dunked in cinnamon and sugar, with a marachino cherry in the center. I kid you not, that was the sum of my knowledge from three separate home-ec classes I took in three different school systems.)

I mean *real* Home Economics. Average salary for a person in their mid-20s. Average salary for a person in their mid-30s. Average living expenses for a single person, average living expenses for a person with 2.4 children. How to shop on a budget. How to read nutrition labels and ingredient lists. How to cook, and I don't mean how to heat up canned soup. How to roast a chicken. How to cook a chicken stock with the leftover carcass.

If you want to get really clever like I do, tie in Home Ec with 10th grade Biology (or whenever they teach it). Teach a unit on Physiology, including nutrition and calorie expenditure during exercise. Do a unit on Botany and create a school garden. Use the vegetables grown in the Botany class in the Home Ec classes. You better believe that kids will learn how to cook really well, really quickly when faced with the threats of that big wrestler dude in the Botany class if he finds out his carefully-tended pea shoots have been scorched instead of gently sauteed with shallots.

If you want to get extra super clever, tie it in with Social Studies or Civics or whatever they teach these days. Have the Biology students calculate how much yield they get from their seeds, how much fertilizer and insecticide affect their yield (have a side-by-side comparison with "organic" produce), and then have the Home Ec kids calculate how many meals they can produce with that yield. Have both groups run calculations on approximate calorie counts and nutrient content: will those yields adequately feed people, or will their population start suffering malnutrition? Now have the Civics kids jump in with studies of agricultural policies in this country, transportation laws and environmental laws. How much will it cost to feed this nation healthful food? You need x space to grow carrots for n people. If you grow corn in that space instead, how many multiples of n can you feed instead?

Think of what kind of people our public schools could produce if we had the political will! Whatever happened to American ingenuity and a desire to learn and improve? Did that end in 1969?

it brings to mind that we need to informally form coops

[...]

This way everyone gets a variety of foods to eat but no everyone has too cook all the time.

Start with Sunday potluck dinners, or rotating dinners (could be a burden on one person/family, but the tradeoff is thy also get to pick a menu, or theme, or whatever to their liking that one week). When I was growing up, potlucks were big rural town lived in and the surrounding towns. It was a population of old Yankees and new hippies, which made for interesting politics but the one thing they could all agree on was "Communal Meals Are Good" (that, and "Yuppie Bastards Stop Clearing Our Woods To Build Your Ugly Houses").

It's not a true collective environment, but at the very least you get exposure to what other people find tasty, try some new things (I had an amazing chicken adobo from a Filipino friend at a potluck I went to a few weeks ago, and in exchange brought spicy Moroccan beef stew which went over like gangbusters) and social gatherings always seem to go really, really well when everyone is eating really delicious food.

We also did have a food co-op when I was growing up. The co-op organizer took orders every week from all the members, and I assume the benefit was that because they were buying more or less in bulk, they could get stuff cheaper. Then when the order came in, everything was set up in the town hall and people walked through with their order lists and picked up their items.