How should I undertake fresh food shopping as part of my homemaking & good housekeeping activities?

Fresh food shopping should be embarked on every two or three days - as part of your good housekeeping and homemaking activities – the reasoning behind this ideology is that if you leave it any longer than this, then you aren’t getting the best from your food.

In addition it must be noted that particular foods such as fruit and veg will deteriorate pretty fast, which means the longer the intervals between fresh food shopping trips the less nutrients you will be getting from them, plus stale food does not taste nearly as good as fresh food.

Now with the obligatory introduction done and dusted’ it’s time to give you some great tips and advice on fresh food shopping.

Where should I purchase my fresh food from

There is no specific right or wrong answer to this conundrum just little advantages and disadvantages to look out for on choosing retail outlets for particular foods.

Let’s take a look at supermarkets; these are very handy outlets for the weekly shop, but their sheer size and volume of customer; not to mention the temptation to overspend on foods you don’t really need doesn’t really lend itself to convenience, i.e. visiting the supermarket 4 times a week is not really practical, in fact it’ll be a nightmare.

On the other hand supermarkets do have a couple of advantages over smaller independent retail outlets. Firstly, they have huge resources to spend on refrigeration and storage, which means that their food is more likely to be kept fresher. This slight advantage, however, must be tempered with the fact that supermarkets don’t necessarily use local produce which begs the question whether or not it’s as fresh as food from local independent outlets.

The second advantage is that because supermarkets buy in such huge bulk they benefit from savings, these savings are then passed onto you in terms of lower prices.

The advantage of purchasing your fresh food shopping from smaller specialists’ stores is that the food is highly likely to be local produce, which means that it is initially going to be fresher than the produce found in supermarkets; however, a note of caution needs to be added, the turnover of stock in smaller stores may be lower than within their larger counterparts; this means that food isn’t as fresh as it should be.

The good news for you is that this dilemma can be overcome if you make sure that you choose produce from the back of the shelf, this is because the food here is usually fresher than the food at the front due to a thing called stock rotation, stock rotation is where the storekeeper will replenish the stock on the shelves from the back of it to the front; the idea behind this is, is that when people pick things off the shelf they’ll take them from the front rather than from the back, which means the older stock will be purchased first.

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