Valuable Online Resource: Fair Health Consumer

You know how you can use the Kelly Blue Book to look up the price of a car?  You input the make, model, condition, etc, and it tells you more or less what a fair price for the car is?

Imagine having something like that for medical expenses.  Hospital stays are notoriously ruinous without insurance, and sometimes even with it.  The thing about insurance is that they keep staff onhand to dispute markups on services.  So the insurance company (and by extension, you) aren't stuck paying a thousand percent markup on over-the-counter painkillers.  

The Problem

Why is it like this?  It's actually not as simple as hospitals being greedy.  It's because the US healthcare system has, overall, shifted away from the metaphorical ounce of prevention in favor of the metaphorical pound of cure.  Hospitals, you see, can't refuse to treat someone based on whether they can pay.  But because healthcare is so expensive, a lot of people don't go to the doctor or dentist immediately when they have a problem.  

Instead, they postpone dealing with the issue until it goes away or turns into an emergency.  Naturally, this is when it's most expensive to treat, and narrows your options considerably, but if you can't afford even the basic prevention (because your insurance sucks, or you don't have any at all), it doesn't really matter to you.  So the hospital treats the unfortunate person, but the person can't pay.  The hospital is still out that money, so what are they to do?  Pestering the person via debt collection agencies isn't a very successful option, plus it takes time.  

The solution, as it happens, is to jack up all their prices on everything.  By making people who can pay, pay more, they can systemically balance their budgets after a fashion.  

As you can hopefully see, this is a crappy solution.  And it's vastly unfair to people without insurance companies to negotiate on their behalf, or even with an insurance company that half-asses their negotiations.  It's also typical that people will go into getting medical procedures with absolutely no idea how much it'll cost them, then getting slapped with the bill later.  

The Immediate Solution

For both of these issues, there's a solution, and it's called Fair Health.  While the website has its own tutorials and informative videos, I'll briefly explain how some of the site works.

You can look up how much a procedure or treatment will cost you.  The site will ask you where you are, because that matters in the calculations.  It may also ask you whether you're in-network or out-of-network, which is insurance-ese for asking whether you're getting the service from a doctor they approve of, in a place they approve of. 

Finally, they'll ask for something significantly harder to provide: a CPT code or precise description of the service.  I know about CPT codes because I did a bit of work with them at the front desk of an ABA clinic, but I don't think most people are familiar, so:

In brief, a CPT code is a precise designation for a medical treatment or procedure.  

For example, I looked up D2392, which is "a plain white resin-composite filling that covers two surfaces on a back tooth."  You've got the material type (resin composite), the procedure type (filling), the location (a back tooth, like a molar), and the approximate amount of effort involved (two surfaces, meaning the top and side of the tooth could be involved, which means a moderate amount of material, molding, and drilling is likely to be involved).  

You can look these CPT codes up online, but in all honesty, you're better off just getting the exact CPT codes from the doctor's office when these procedures are proposed.  If you've got a smartphone, you could even look up the codes while you're in there with the doctor.  

The site also has informative sections about insurance, including explanations of common insurance-ese terms like "in network" and "out-of-network." It's fairly basic information, and I don't feel like it's super-well organized, but it is good information to know.  Having it somewhere free and publically accessible is definitely preferable to not having it.  

There's one odd caveat with this site, and it's that it doesn't cover government insurances.  Medicare, Medicaid, and Tricare data is not included here.  The site pretty much exists to help uninsured people, and people on private insurance, make sure they aren't scammed or overcharged.  

In the Long Term

You may have noticed this website doesn't solve the systemic problem of hospitals jacking up their prices to compensate for treating people who need the help but can't pay.  It can help by educating individual consumers, but the overall problem persists.  Y'know what would solve that overall problem?  

Universal healthcare.  Whether that's Medicare for All or some other version, returning to the "ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure" model of healthcare would save us all a fortune.  People would be able to get cavities filled without feeling like they've chosen their health over being able to pay rent that month.  

In an age of unprecedented bad physical and mental health, where the average lifespan (for everyone, not just autistic people) is actually decreasing for the first time in decades, I feel like we could use the change.  

By the way, if you ever want to do a good deed and personally take a metaphorical bite out of the suffering this unfair healthcare system creates, RIP Medical Debt is an excellent way to do so.  They buy up uncollected medical debt from debt collection agencies and forgive it.  It's an unusual method, but it lets them take $100 in donations and use it, on average, to forgive $10,000 of debt.  Be sure to check it out!

Grocery Shopping On a Special Diet: Fruits and Veggies

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I'm showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what's safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn't come for. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid artificial food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Last time we explored the meat and deli section, where basically nothing is humane and snacks are abundant.  I also mentioned a pair of humane and sustainable alternative delivery services: ButcherBox and VitalChoice.  Ideally, you'd buy your meat and eggs locally, from a family farm with standards you can rely on.  In practice, it can be hard to find those places, make time to drive to them, or even afford them. So Butcherbox and VitalChoice can give you an alternative.

This week we'll tackle the most important part of the grocery store: the fresh produce section. 

Like the meat and deli sections, the produce section is divided into long islands of products, rather than proper aisles.  The back half is more or less vegetables and root vegetables, and the front half is fruit.  And there's one long aisle that's the other side of the refrigerated section from a few weeks ago.  Also off to the side is a peanuts and tree nuts/snacks section, kind of between the produce and the bakery.  It really fits nowhere in particular, so I tossed it in here.  

While many parts of the grocery store stay more or less the same over time, the produce section does not.  About the only constant is what I mentioned above: it goes fruit, then vegetables, then root vegetables.  The specifics of what's in season and available varies.  

This flexibility is especially true with these square islands, which host the weekly deals.  "Let the buyer beware" is always relevant advice when buying produce.  Even with modern shipping and refrigeration, it's hard to keep perishables from perishing.  Past the islands, you can see the array of self-select apples.  There's about 9 kinds of apples.  Which sounds like a lot, and it kind of is for what time of year it is.  (It is, at this moment, late February, which is late winter.)

There are actually hundreds, even thousands, of apple varieties.  Some of them don't look like what the consumer expects.  Some of them are tiny (but taste amazing).  Some of them simply don't ship well.  

The other side of the apple aisle: bagged bulk apples.  They're almost entirely 3 pound bags.  These bagged apples tend to be on the smaller size compared to their "choose your own" counterparts, and because they're pre-bagged, imperfections may escape your notice.  Imperfect fruit is hardly the end of the world, but as an incredibly privileged USian used to nearly perfect fruit all the time, it's something I'd notice.  

Grapes and berries.  This aisle was long enough that I had to stand pretty far back to get it all in frame.  There's strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and more strawberries.  Followed by dessert shells and dessert breads to serve those berries in, because there is no escape from the temptation to buy desserts or snacks.  And then several varieties of grapes: green, red, and black.  

In other seasons there would be at least two kinds of red grapes, and I've also run across a white grape called Carnival in the organic section.  It's worth noting that the majority of the grapes for sale here are seedless.

Citrus and melons.  Mostly citrus.  The bagged tiny citruses near the front are a particularly popular brand of clementine that's almost entirely seedless as well as being extremely sweet.  The US has a sweet tooth (by which I mean a sugar addiction) and even the fruit has to accommodate it.  

There's also bagged lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruits.  After which there's the "choose your own" for if you really only need one lime for your recipe.  Which is me, often.  And then the melons, which include watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew.  Or it might be honeyrock.  There's been some interesting experiments in crossing melons and I haven't kept up with what's most popular.  

We now move onto the pears and assorted other fruit.  You can count four kinds of pears (Bartlett, D'Anjou, Bosc, and Red), as well as mangoes, pineapples, dragonfruit, kiwis, peaches, plums, coconuts, and nectarines.  

Something I should point out, and which you'll notice next photo if you know anything about bananas... This great and mighty variety of fruit is available for purchase, but don't think for a moment it's at its very best or tastes anything like a fresh-picked version.  To survive being transported long distances, most fruit is picked long before it's ripe, shipped specially to keep it from ripening, and then ripened once it's arrived.  

This results in a significantly stunted flavor and texture.  I've had fresh mango in a place that grows it.  The mangos you can buy here are definitely mangos, but the flavor is deeply disappointing by comparison.  

As promised, the bananas.  I'm not sure why, but the US really loves these.  Note that most of them are green, rather than bright yellow the way the organic ones at the end are.  That's not just because people mainly opt to buy the ripe ones.  It's because the bananas are brought it very very underripe, and ripen as they sit.  

Another interesting fact about these is that they're Cavendish bananas.  They taste significantly different than the variety that was exported prior to the 1950s, the Gros Michel.  The Gros Michel variety fell prey to a fungal disease and was nearly wiped out.  If you've ever wondered why artificial banana flavor tastes nothing like bananas, it's because it's based on the flavor of the Gros Michel, not the Cavendish.  Also, at some point, the Cavendish will likely fall prey to a similar disease, and we'll all start consuming some other variety of banana instead.  Perhaps Manzanos? 

Before we leave the fruit section, we stop by the organic section.  Like the weekly deals, these sections rotate their contents frequently.  You can never be sure what they'll have available, though because it was grown without pesticides and herbicides, you can expect it to be more expensive than the general offerings.  

In some cases this is a very important section to be aware of.  Pesticides and herbicides can get stuck in the crevices of the fruit, and then be consumed with the fruit.  As a result, autistic and other sensitive folks' systems can get slowly poisoned.  Strawberries are a prime example of this.  All those little nubbly seeds make it impossible to get the chemical residue off without damaging or destroying the fruit.  As such, it's better to buy strawberries organic.  For more information about the Dirty Dozen (buy these organic) and the Clean 15 (no need), follow this link.

Oh, and for a huge markup, you can buy pre-cut fruit.  Let's look at a less extreme example.  Kind of near the end of the middle, there's pineapple cores.  They're basically cylinders of pineapple, with the very center bored out, likely put through a machine designed to generate that shape, and heedless of the exact size of the pineapple.  They cost $5.  Looking back over the photo with the whole pineapples, you could buy one for $2.70.  So for a bit less than twice the price, you don't have to deal with the pineapple skin and greens and center.  

We'll get a bit more absurd now.  There are also chopped strawberries for sale.  $6 for a half pound.  We could buy those.  Ooor we could buy 2 pounds of strawberries with the greens attached, for $4.70.  

Convenience is stunningly expensive.  It also comes with non-recyclable plastic.  

It's time for the long aisle!  Starting at the back, we have the mushrooms (bella, shitake, enoki, portobella and several dried varieties.  We also have the salad dressings, which is a category I flat out ignore.  Salad dressings can hide sugar bombs and can contain so many calories that they singlehanded make your salad into junk food.  I typically don't season my leaves, but if I do, it's with olive oil, salt, and pepper.  It's cheap and easy and tastes good.  What more could you ask?

Premade salads.  Some versions come with greens, some are "mix this with the greens and it's a more complete meal!" boxes.  Either way it's a lot of extraneous plastic.  

Pre-processed greens.  There's actually bagged varieties just to the left, but there was a stocker working there and I didn't want to ask her to move just so I could take my picture.  Anyway, you mainly have spinach and lettuce varieties, but you also have your choice of kale and arugula.  

A brief pause for herbs and flavorful roots, like ginger.  In less interesting times there would be more fresh/live herb options, but in lieu of those you could make do with those tubes of herb paste.  I've never bought one, but it probably works fine as long as you're not using the herbs for appearances.

The "select your own" vegetable section.  I won't list every single thing available here, but suffice it to say there's a lot.  I mostly only stop by this section for lettuce, sugar snap peas, or snow peas.  But if you need just one of something (or a small amount of something), this is where you can go.  The bagged versions will be coming up shortly.

Part of why I rarely use this section is that it's routinely sprayed with water.  This is ostensibly to keep the produce fresher, but it also makes it wet to touch and accelerates the rot process once you get it home.  I'm really not a fan.  

Onward to the main vegetable section.  The tomatoes, peppers, and for some reason, asparagus.  There's a few options for tomatoes, though mainly of the medium and large varieties.  Cherry and grape tomatoes are available, they're just behind the human I was trying to cut out of the picture.  Bell peppers in four colors: yellow, red, orange, and green.  There's actually even a stripey orange and yellow variety that shows up from time to time.  Green peppers are almost always the cheapest.  

I took this to give you a better idea of the variety available here.  Again, there is literally snow on the ground and temperatures are at or below freezing, so these have been shipped from a significant distance away.   It's honestly a very small sample of all the types of peppers that exist, but the fact that it's just flatly available 100% out of local growing season speaks to how absurdly well people in the US live.  Kings and emperors in centuries past didn't have this kind of selection.  

This is a weighing and labeling machine.  Produce doesn't always come in convenient plastic packages.  Sometimes you choose and bag your own using the bags there on the left.  This machine will weigh your produce.  It will also print you a custom bar code so that the bag can be scanned quickly at checkout.  I'm old enough to remember when non-electronic scales were a common thing in grocery stores, but those days seem very long ago when I look at this machine...

Avocados.  Yep.  This is an endcap that's just entirely avocados.  Apparently my generation popularized consumption of them, in part due to their healthiness.  In my memory of decades past, this would have been a small segment of the broader vegetable section, not an entire endcap (plus the weekly sale island at the start).  

Plastic-wrapped broccoli, bulk bags of lettuce heads, bagged baby carrots, and bagged celery.  With salad fixings perched on top of the displays, because God forbid you simply eat salad without extra carbs.  

Organic options of the previous aisle, in an endcap.  Organic does not always mean "better for the environment" unfortunately, but as mentioned in the organic fruit section, it can be your best bet health-wise.  

The other side of the previous long island.  Plastic wrapped cabbage heads, large carrots, broccoli crowns (smaller than the other broccoli option, and with less stem), and cauliflower.  Absolutely everything you see here is sealed in plastic.  It helps preserve the freshness, but the plastic just ends up in a landfill.  

The other endcap on this island-aisle.  I'm honestly not sure why, precisely, this is here, but it is.  These are non-meat, non-dairy options.  Seitan, tofu, pseudocheese, and veganaise.  Please note that even here, there is no escape from the barrage of snacks.  See the dumplings?  

This is a standalone island on the back edge of the area.  It's basically salad fixings.  This side has even more tomatoes, in the smaller varieties.  

And the other side, even more peppers and cucumbers great and small for all your salad needs. I've found the tiny cucumbers nice for personal salads.  

This longer island is the last one in the line.  It's mainly onions and potatoes, though there's yams and some squash for good measure as well.  The endcap has bags of teensy tiny potatoes in up to three colors for a really staggering markup.  Then there are three colors of onions (red, white, and yellow), in both bulk bags and "select your own." 

The other side of the onions/potatoes island-aisle.  Organic varieties of both on the end cap, and bulk bags of russet, yellow, and redskin potatoes.   Potatoes are a very solid food choice when they're not heavily processed or soaked in as much grease as they'll hold.  The problem, of course, is that most potato products fall into at least one of those categories...  

Moving on to the last part of the produce section, which is oddly not fresh at all...

I couldn't get a decent shot of this due to the stocking cart on the right hand side there, but this is basically just a bunch of plastic bags of dried fruit.  The variety here includes cherries, apricots, mango, and prunes.  Dried fruit is great in theory, but in practicality it's typically just more like candy with fiber.  It's usually laced with sugar to make the fruit extra appealing.  Read your nutrition facts and ingredients carefully. 

This is the other side of that display, and it includes seeds and vegetable snacks as well as raisins and dates.  I don't really know what one does to a pea pod to make it into a crispy salted snack, but I'm a little afraid to find out.  

Moving on, we arrive at the bagged dried nuts.  This, like everything else in the store, is a demonstration in absurd variety.  We don't simply have peanuts.  We have blanched peanuts, red skin peanuts, Spanish peanuts, kettle cooked peanuts, raw Spanish peanuts (roast it yourself, I guess?), and mixed nuts with peanuts.  There's also pecans, and a bit further in, there'll be even more types of tree nuts.  As a reminder, this is the second section of snack nuts, the first being around the candy aisle.  

One end of the previous display.  These aren't cooking ingredients, they're snacks.  They're specifically packaged to go in a bowl or be eaten right out of the bag.  Mixed nuts and trail mix (with dried fruit) varieties.  

The other broad side of the display, where we can mainly find almonds and cashews.  You can have them roasted or raw, pre-sliced, salted or not, and blanched.  

Last but not least, the other end of the display, which is entirely pistachios.  All from a single company, but you can get sweet chili, salt and pepper, honey-roasted, and basic pre-shelled varieties.  

And that finishes the produce section!  It's been a surprisingly long trip through the grocery store.  I started this series in early September and never expected it to take a half year to finish, even with doing posts every two weeks.  It's been very educational for me, and I hope, for you as well.  It turned up some interesting (and horrifying) information about grocery store practices.  

In the course of this project, I went from shopping almost entirely at this grocery store (Meijer) to starting at Target (where the employees seem happier and more like people, anyway) and then only buying what I couldn't find there.  The sheer amount of manipulative marketing in terms of alcoholism and snacks in every corner of Meijer is more than I can morally tolerate.  I hope to transition to not shopping at this store at all in the coming year.

I'll do a bonus post in a couple weeks to show you the checkout aisles, because they've changed somewhat in the last few years and I think it's worth knowing why.  Beyond that, thank you for joining me on this adventure!

Grocery Shopping On a Special Diet: Meat and Deli

Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store.  Week by week, I'm showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what's safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn't come for. 

As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:

• dairy-free
• low sugar
• avoid ultraprocessed junk
• avoid food coloring
• conditional vegetarianism
• avoid high histamine foods
• awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options

Last time we finished off the numbered aisles.  We also saw a truly staggering number of TV dinners, and learned why, nutritionally and cost-wise, they're a trap.  This week we'll look into the meat and deli sections.

It's worth noting that there will be almost nothing for me in this section, because of the conditional vegetarianism mentioned above.  The US meat industry is, on the whole, supremely uninterested in matters of ethics and morality.  Meat animals are treated like objects, not living creatures, and given as little freedom as possible while still producing an edible product.  Maybe not a very healthy product, for you or for the environment, but that's irrelevant in the face of greed.

I'll pause here for a moment to note something very important:  there are a lot of things in life to care about.  One of my personal causes is the meat industry,  because I think that animals deserve to have lives beyond simply being my food.  If that is not high priority for you, or you don't have the money to afford more humane options, that is okay.  If your passion is ending human slavery, or starvation, or homelessness, or racial inequality, or just surviving this year because you're struggling hard and there seems to be no respite from the insanity, and you don't have time or energy to spend looking at the food on your plate right now... that is understandable.  This is something I care about, so I'll talk about it.  

However.  In no way am I saying, "animal welfare is more important than any of those other things." It is important to me, and I'll be giving you information in regards to it.  I hope you'll look at it and keep it in mind, but if you don't, I am not somehow "better than you" or whatever it is self-righteous jerks are saying these days.  

Skipping past the very disturbing pictures of what the meat industry considers appropriate treatment for living creatures, I'll simply link you to Certified Humane's factsheets page.  Some of the common practices are described therein.  You can also check the FAQs page for a lot of very specific questions about their standards.  

I consume Certified Humane and Animal Welfare Approved products due to their transparency and independent verification processes.  This grocery store typically carries very little of either of those, but I'll point out the exception. 

I figured we could start with the fresh meat counter.  I had to wait a good bit to get a shot without anyone in it, but I think it was worth it.  The counter is almost always staffed by at least one person, waiting to weigh and custom-chop whatever you care to buy from their selection.  

A reasonable selection.  And all of it seems nice and fresh.  Did you know red dye goes into most beef products to make it seem fresher than it is?  They also tinker with the air balance in the cases and packages to keep that red color as long as possible.  The meat isn't super fresh, it's just been made to look like it is.

Same with that salmon, by the way.  That dark color is unlikely to be natural.  Farmed fish doesn't have the type of diet to produce that color, so the farms feed them the processed color.  Otherwise the resulting filets would be grey. 

Before we dive into the rest of the meat section, let's have a look at the lunch meats.  As you can see, they are legion, and roughly organized by brand. Ham, turkey, chicken, salami, roast beef, bologna, it's all here.  You can also snag hot dogs on the far end there. And, though it's hard to see, meat-and-cheese snacks just after the hot dogs.  

 

Past the the lunchmeat and the meat counter proper is a set of floating refrigerator islands that serve as aisles.  They're roughly organized by meat type.  For example, here's the beef cuts and lamb sections.  (Lamb is all the way at the end, basically a nubbin of a section due to the lower demand.)  Also, lest you be worried... that's not all the beef available.  It's just certain cuts.  There's still ground beef and such elsewhere, even aside from the butcher's counter above.  We'll get there, but first, we have to cross an ocean of pig products.  

Your basic chops and cuts for main dishes, plus a few rib racks for your barbecue-in-the-winter desires.  

There's also a whole section for sausage  It's mostly the ground variety, but don't worry, bratwurst and smoked sausage have their own sections.  Also, in case you were wondering if there were going to be snacks in this section... fear not!  Here they are, on the near end of the main aisle.  They're prepackaged meat and cheese snacks, in case you didn't get enough of those in the cheese section.  

And here's the rest of the sausage.  And also more snacks.  As you can see, the impulse buy endcaps may or may not be entirely related to the aisle they're connected to, because that's Lunchables, hot dogs, and lunch meat.  None of which has much to do with sausage.  

You know, prior to 2020 I think I would have said more of these aisles were devoted to beef products, rather than pork products.  I'm honestly unsure if there's a supply issue with beef, or if this is just how it's been for the last dozen years and I just didn't notice.  At any rate, ham and ground turkey share an aisle here.  I'm told ground turkey is a lot leaner than ground beef, but since I typically buy my beef locally, I haven't had much occasion to try it.  It is definitely more environmentally friendly than beef.  

Did you wonder where the bacon was?  Worry no more, there's a whole aisle for it.  Sunday, Canadian, and streaky, it's all here.  Various brands and price points, and varying levels of fattiness.  

Despite most of the meat section being for pork products, there is still some room for chicken... so here it is.  We're mostly looking at chicken breasts here, but there are also thighs and ground chicken.  

Please note the sign here: "Due to high demand Limit 2 on all fresh chicken products."  I've never actually found out if this is enforced, or if it's merely a suggestion.  I've also basically never seen a sign like this prior to 2020.  (Now that 2020 is over, I've seen dozens like it and barely notice except when it affects my immediate shopping trip.)

Mostly hidden in the near side of the aisle is the "we're fancy and humane" section.  Katie's Best is a GAP Step 2 option.  I prefer mine Step 4 and above, which is why I opt for the other available brand there: Smart Chicken.  

You have your option of boneless breast meat or boneless thigh meat.  It's a sign of how astonishingly sheltered I am that I honestly prefer just eating breast meat and will skip chicken entirely if it's not that.  It's a texture and flavor thing.  Also a "good Lord that's some serious privilege" thing.  

It's hard to see on the package, but on the right hand side label, at the bottom left, there's the Certified Humane label.  Weirdly, only the organic Smart Chicken has that label.  The regular (blue packaging) version doesn't.  

Two of the specials for this week.  This isn't the cheapest I've ever seen ground beef (I've seen it for 99 cents a pound a few times), but it's pretty inexpensive.  It's a pity the cows involved suffered horribly and likely never tasted grass in their lives, because that's the only way you can afford to offer meat that cheaply.  

This just makes me wonder how many kinds of pepperoni a person really needs.  For those counting, that's four brands, in standard, low fat, tiny, and "cup shaped" varieties.  Why?  I really don't know.  

And last in the meat section, the only section I regularly visit.  Ground beef is fine and all, but this section also sometimes contains ground bison.  It also, as you can see, contains the growing share of plant-based protein products.  When Impossible ground "meat" showed up next to my ground bison, I was dubious (and bought some anyway, because why not?).  There seems to be a significant demand, though, because now it's not just Impossible products, it's Lightlife and Pure and Beyond Meat.  I have yet to try most of these, because I'm pretty happy with ground bison and my locally raised beef.  But I really should, because some of these might be delicious. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

On to the deli section.  The store actually goes Meat Section, Bakery Section, Deli Section, in an L shape, but that would have made no thematic sense and also been a very lengthy post, so I decided to cluster meat and deli in one and get to the bakery later.

Once again, you can go up to the counter and have exact ounces and pounds of meat and cheese portioned out for you for the price of that meat/cheese and a smidgen of human contact.  

Because meat is still meat, and dairy is not my friend, I also don't use this counter.  This is a bonus, because I prefer to avoid talking to strangers as a rule.  Too many factors in communicating for (usually) very little reward.  

A shot of the offerings at the counter.  Note the naan and various sandwich breads below the case, ready to immediately pair with whatever you ordered.  

Just past the cheeses, there's a great pile of hummus and guacamole.  And of course, the chips to go with it.  

Meat and cheese sandwich not sufficient for your immediate snacking pleasure?  Or perhaps you wanted something on the side.  Either way, here's various pasta salads (a food I never learned to enjoy) as well as potato salad (same) and coleslaw (also same).  They come in sweet and savory varieties.  And naturally, more bread to eat it with.  

We're still dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, so this section 100% makes sense... but I can safely tell you this existed before the pandemic and will almost inevitably exist afterwards.  If you can't muster the energy for human contact but still want fresh sliced meats and cheeses, here's an option.  These are always meats and cheeses available at the counter, but pre-sliced and bagged.  

"But where are the snacks?" you might be asking.  We've barely had any snacks, but that's because, well...  basically the rest of this post will be snacks and convenience food.  Here we have chicken pieces, preportioned pasta salad, miniature Thanksgiving dinner in eco-hostile plastic trays, and more.  

If you can't see, that display says, "Let us do the cooking tonight" and calls this concept "All Together Meals."  You can get one of those small chickens, plus a 2 liter of Coke, for $7.  That's supposed to be dinner.  I suppose you could make it worse by adding a big pile of pasta salad on top of this... which would be very easy to do simply by turning around.  

So for anyone who's counting, this grocery store thinks "dinner" is a roast chicken and a 2 liter of Coke.  That only works if you split that chicken and pop 10 ways, according to the sign.  And of course it's still missing a giant pile of vegetables and a small portion of healthy grains to actually be a real meal.  

The rest of the deli section is a series of floating island-aisles, about half the length of the meat section ones.  They're stubby rectangles with shelves on all four sides. This particular one is the closest to the deli counter, as you can perhaps tell by looking at the packaged-meat contents.  Do note the snack packages of beef jerky and meat/cheese snacks right next to it.  Those are awfully small, though, don't you think?

The grocery store agrees!  Here's some bigger ones.  Meat and cheese trays, cubed snack cheeses, spreadable cheese balls... and just above it, pretzel crisps to round it out.  

Here's some more snack cheeses and meat/cheese snack combos.  Please remember this is the second round of cheese, because we had a regular cheese section in the dairy aisle already.  All of this is just bonus... or in case you couldn't be convinced to buy cheese the first time around.  

Additional cheese blocks/chunks.  These are the "fancy" compared to the regular cheese section.  This is also your spot to pick up feta cheese.  

More snack cheeses and party cheese options.  Of particular note, the miniature cheese wheels in nine different flavors.  Even with several of those being types of cheddar, it's an absurdity.  And again, more crackers to go with your cheese.  In case you don't feel like walking all the way to the cracker aisle.  

Even more cheese.  Presumably these are the imported cheeses, but I honestly didn't inspect it very carefully.  I can't safely consume any of this.  

This is the last "it's just cheese!" picture, I promise.  But you get the idea.  If you want cheese, you will be buried in cheese.  Choice paralysis has never been so convenient!  And crackers and crisps standing by once you make your choice.  

This was a particularly long aisle, so I split it into two pictures to show you all the options.  There are various premade cold sandwiches and subs (with a high markup) available for hungry shoppers, as well as prepackaged soups, ramen, mac'n'cheese, fruit cups, and, inexplicably, hard boiled eggs.  

For the low low price of at least four eggs (possibly as many as eight, depending on the chickens' treatment), you may acquire one plastic-encrusted hard boiled egg.  Hooray?

Fish filets, prepackaged crabcakes, etc.  I mostly don't do seafood but it's here if you want it.  

I don't even know what to say to this one.  I guess I'm in the minority for not liking potato salad?  There's a few varieties, of course, but really.  It's all potato salad.  

If you thought this place didn't have enough convenience food, you were right.  Meet the take and bake pizzas, as well as more party trays and ready-made cheese fondu... ish... stuff.  Have I mentioned this is all right near the vegetable and fruit section and wandering too far in any direction will land you into all this?

Yep.  Before we kiss this section goodbye... if you can be tempted by convenience food but insist it be hot... well, for a nice markup, you may buy a pizza right here and save yourself the trouble of having to wait until you get home, or use the oven.  

So yeah.  That's the meat and deli sections of this grocery store.  We're almost done with my trip through the grocery store.

By the way, you can eat meat and seafood more sustainably without having to resort to store-hopping the way I do.  There's delivery services (pandemic-friendly!) that will ship you a box of clean, sustainably produced meat once a month (or more, if you want).  

Butcher Box is the everything option.  They'll do chicken, beef, pork, and seafood.  You can let them send you a mix of what's available, or customize your own box. This is a really simple way of ensuring you eat better, fresher, and kinder.  All it takes is some freezer space.  As a bonus, they actually mention Temple Grandin's more humane butchering and slaughtering practices as part of their process.  

For folks specifically interested in seafood, please consider VitalChoice, which has a monthly box option but also lets you do regular online orders from their thoroughly-traced and -certified offerings.  Mercury and other heavy metals are a serious problem in seafood, and they're particularly detrimental to autistic people, whose bodies may be unable to purge those toxic substances from our systems effectively.  VitalChoice is one of the very few autism-safe seafood options.