The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

Danielle calls it the anti-grocery store grocery store. I call it the Place Where We Go to Buy Snacks for Seanzilla That Don’t Have Too Much Corn on the Ingredients List.

For a long time I was really fascinated with the idea of Trader Joe’s because it was shrouded in mystery. It was this place that had shelves full of presumably really great products for all the cool kids who lived in cooler cities than mine. They bought everything from canned soup to bulk nuts to beer at Trader Joe’s, and I had never been in one. I felt so excluded!

But then one night in Ann Arbor I rode along with my friend Luke in his law school Honda Accord, which was one of the first things to go when he was hired by a law firm in Washington, D.C., to buy chocolates and beer. I was so excited to finally be going to a Trader Joe’s!

But it was anticlimactic! It was a grocery store!

It wasn’t a small little shop with lots of interesting gourmet food items on nice shelves beneath incandescent lights. It was a grocery store with a whole bunch of Trader Joe’s-branded foodstuffs.

So I kind of forgot about it, secure in the knowledge that I wasn’t missing out on anything too awesome.

It would take a year for me to understand the hype. A TJ’s (to use the diminutive favored by fans of the chain) opened in Warwick last fall, and we’ve popped in a few times since then. Again, the first time, I didn’t feel the excitement. I saw a lot of what appeared to be prepared and frozen foods, and that was it.

I should have read the labels.

When you compare the ingredients list on a box of TJ’s cereal bars to that on a box of NutriGrain bars, for example, you’ll notice something interesting: no high-fructose corn syrup in the TJ’s version. The ingredients are, on the whole, simpler.

The other key is price (of course). Organic items abound, and their prices are significantly lower than what we find at our local grocery store—and way lower than Whole Foods. They didn’t get the nickname “Whole Paycheck” for nothing.

So there it is: for all of us trying to heed the cry of Michael Pollan and eat a diet of foods we can recognize as actual food, Trader Joe’s is a great place to be.

Because sometimes you just need organic miniature peanut butter sandwich crackers.