Food Shopping

Something I have found about the Atkins is that it makes me take notice of what I am eating. I have gone from being the sort of woman who rushes around the supermarket throwing anything and everything into my trolley to being a keen labelista who causes holdups in the aisles as I read every tiny detail on the label before placing it in my basket.

Until I started this, I never used to give a thought to what I was shovelling into my mouth every day, as a consequence I ate a lot of rubbish - but in the six weeks or so since I had to start reading food labels, I have become a lot more choosy about where I shop.

Here in the UK we have some major supermarket chains who offer extremely cheap food and a lot of convenience foods - but I have found myself steering away from these chains and heading towards a smaller supermarket chain that caters to the most discerning of labelistas. The Co-operative.

The CoOp - as the Brits call it, has a proud tradition of serving the interests of the consumer (read more here ) and you even get a dividend if you are a member!

Something I have noticed is that the bacon doesn't seem to shrivel up to nothing like the bacon from other, larger stores and all the meat and poultry products are clearly labelled as produced from animals humanely reared and kept - and of course, the eggs are free-range.

Another nice thing about shopping locally in my CoOp is that I don't have to use my car to do my food shopping - I can get what I need and load it onto my bike.

I am very fortunate in that I have a great little shopping street very close to my home - we have all sorts of things, a greengrocer (a bit of rarity here in London) and an old fashioned butcher's shop (who also sells all sorts of exciting cheeses like Red Leicester with chilli or White Stilton with Cranberries, unfortunately not induction-legal) - and, joy of joys - a fishmonger.

One of the lovely things about these sorts of shops is that you can pick and choose what you are going to buy rather than just picking a bag of vegetables of dubious quality off a shelf in a supermarket and the greengrocer will stock vegetables and herbs that are not always available in the bigger stores.

I think that an unexpected by-product of my diet is that I have rediscovered the pleasure of shopping in places where I can talk to the owner, check out the produce and have a chat with my neighbours at the same time in the queue to get things weighed. Shopping has become a pleasant social event instead of a mad dash with a trolley around an anonymous, cavernous, fluorescent-lit building.

Keetje