healthy or wealthy or green?

[madamez]

OK, how does everyone else balance this out? There's the food you're supposed to eat/feed to DCs for the health benefits, then there's the food you're supposed to avoid because it's air-freighted in or made of endangered species - and then there's the ethics of avoiding air-freighted food but realising that boycotting it means subsistence farmers starving... and then there's trying to juggle all this on a limited income.
So what do the rest of you do?

as healthy and cheap as possible here.

We shop at the farmer's market. It works out to about the same price as supermarkets, but we go local and get tasty, healthy food, too.

we have milk juice and eggs from milkman
fruit and veg box, topped up on weekends at local market ( have just started this, am v impressed!)
rest from tesco (online)
get to butchers/fishmongers if I'm on the highstreet but don't go 'specially

I buy as much as I can Locally. I go to the farmer's market, butchers and have my milk delievered. I try my best to buy fair trade when its available and would also buy organic if available.

get as much as i can organic and local and top up the rest with the cheapest of the cheap. my shop works out about the same as if i went standard brand everything.

want to go to market but for some in explicable reason it's in the middle of city centre on a saturday and dp has a small seizure at the possibility of driving in due to weekend traffic and with a toddler and a baby and no double buggy the bus trip is a barrel of laughs... not!

Local is most important to me - so I go to Butchers that only source locally and abatoir is on site, greengrocers have stuff grown around the village. I would always buy UK over anything flown in, so if it is a choice between UK grown or Organic from Kenya, I will buy the non organic from UK. The rest is pretty much supermarket and price is a large factor. I am about to get a vege box though, and am trying to decide between Northern Harvest and Abel and Cole...

Thanks for the tip about the line-caught-tuna. I do a bit of everything, really, and DS has suddenly taken to farmer's markets after a week or two of going "No farmer's market" rather piteously every time we went near the bus stop - the secret is to stop at the organic local sausage stall So sometimes it's all healthy local food and sometiems it's a bolt round Sainsbury's and sometimes lunch is fishfingers...
Don't have a vegbox because I really can't quite see getting through it with just me and DS, who is 2. Yes I know you can cook'n'freeze, but the freezer's rammed with stuff anyway and it would just, like accumulate. I just keep reassuring myself that DS looks healthy enough, eats most of what he's given, and that very few kids actually die from having oven chips occasionally.

Riverford and similar box schemes are good - as much local as possible and nothing air freighted.

Well, ideal world: organic shop which sells local stuff and shows you food miles and producer details for each item. And there is such a shop but when I emailed to ask some basic questions they didn't reply so I'm not using them. It was about delivery times and as we're not here during the day time I really do need to know!

What I actually do: buy organic from Tesco and fairtrade where possible.

But it isn't cheap. although could be a lot less if we a) meal planned and b) didn't eat meat/fish

We get Riverford veg and fruit boxes, local farm meat and Tesco on line for the rest. I feel like I've signed a contract with the devil every time but we couldn't afford the organic boxes and meat if we didn't do it. I have to keep the rest down to £60 a week and you can delete items if it's higher. I try to keep it all organic but if it's over £60 I swap some items to non organic. I get intensely irritated by rich celebrity chefs who say we should farm shop for everything. There is no way I can drag my gang round the farm shop every week for the rest(too much effort avoiding being punted out the way by wicker basket wielding weekenders buying up half the butchers counter). Also just simply can't afford it. I actually think farms need to do more to attract families with youing kids eg sell say 2 for 1 on organic milk etc. Our local one resembles Harrod's food hall selling chickens eggs with the name of each different chicken written on each egg- honest, I'm not joking. Why!!!!!

I try to buy in season but then find that DCs forget that they like things they haven't seen for a few months - except for strawberries!