#102 – The Guide to Getting Out of Supermarkets
How, when you’ve got limited money, no spare time and family who are used to eating what they eat…
How when you can’t find alternatives, don’t have the room to grow it yourself and don’t have the headspace…
How do you get out of supermarkets?
In this, our Guide to Getting Out of Supermarkets episode, we’ll give you a stack of practical ideas (from us and from our supporters) that’ll change things up.
You’ll leave inspired, tooled-up and as ready as we can ever help you be to have your home turn its back on our industrial food system and say hello to sane, local supplies; food as it is meant to be.
And, as requested by supporters, we kept the recording running and talked about the other place most of us want to get away from, but find incredibly hard: Amazon. This extra recording will be going up on our private podcast feed for supporters of the show.
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Resources:
Sir Patrick Holden quotes about industrial milk/Tesco are from here
Episode 66 – 50 Ways to Save Money on an Ancestral Diet Part 1
Episode 67 – 50 Ways to Save Money on an Ancestral Diet Part 2
Episode 9 – Quitting Supermarkets
Episode 46 – Sir Patrick Holden Interview
Episode 61 – Organic Small Scale Dairy interview with Rebecca Holden
Shopping online:
US: Azure
UK: Gilchesters
UK: Crowd Farming
UK: Suma
UK: Hodmedods
Mentioned – Fatworks.com (we haven’t researched this ourselves but reputable shoppers have recommended)
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The podcast has a website here!
Andrea is on Instagram at Farm and Hearth
Alison is taking a break from Instagram. You can stay in touch with her via her newsletter at Ancestral Kitchen
The podcast is on Instagram at Ancestral Kitchen Podcast
The podcast is mixed and the music is written and recorded by Alison’s husband, Rob. Find him here: Robert Michael Kay
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Transcript:
Alison Kay (00:18.4)
Hello Andrea.
Andrea (00:19.972)
Hello, Allison.
Alison Kay (00:22.231)
How are you?
Andrea (00:23.824)
I am actually quite well. And how are you?
Alison Kay (00:26.381)
Good. Yeah, I’m good and I’m really excited to get our teeth into this subject again. So I’m ready to go. I’m all fired up and ready to go. Yeah.
Andrea (00:36.025)
yeah.
Andrea (00:41.592)
Okay, well speaking of getting your teeth in before you jump too quick, what did you eat before we started to give you the strength for this?
Alison Kay (00:44.47)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (00:47.957)
We had leftovers that were cooked yesterday, pork mince, ground pork in your case, with onion and pepper and some chopped up Brussels sprouts and some cabbage and a lot of sage. Rob’s been really missing sage. So he said, we haven’t got any sage, get some sage. So I got some sage and he went a bit.
Andrea (00:54.626)
favorite.
Andrea (01:10.096)
Alison Kay (01:16.574)
bonkers with the sage. So it was really sagey. And yeah, so just leftovers with that today. Plus we put some rice and a few extra vegetables, some little kale things, like the sprigs of kale that grow when kale stop growing, the little mini kind of kale. They call them kaleettes, which sounds good, doesn’t it? And rice in the insta pot. So we had the pork with all the veggies in.
Andrea (01:18.65)
Alright, good.
Alison Kay (01:45.972)
and then rice with lots of extra veggies on the side. How about you?
Andrea (01:51.472)
I didn’t know those things had a name. Well, like, let’s see, how can we sell this? I know. Well, Rob will be pleased and not surprised at all to know that yesterday I made tapioca pudding for everyone for breakfast and I used 18 eggs.
Alison Kay (01:53.886)
No, not at all, I think they made it up.
Alison Kay (01:59.827)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (02:10.573)
Okay. How many? my gosh. You know, we are having a probably some of the listeners know, but not many of them. We’re having a UK meetup of Patreons and we had a call earlier on today to talk about plans for it. And there were several people who commented on how many eggs you eat.
Andrea (02:23.012)
Yeah!
Andrea (02:32.752)
This will add to the mythology. They’re like, listen, Allison, isn’t Cheryl. my gosh. Well, there was 18 eggs every day. There was a gallon and a quart of milk plus a pint of cream and there was maple syrup and honey and vanilla and three cups of tapioca balls.
Alison Kay (02:38.508)
Yeah, there we go.
Alison Kay (02:43.61)
Hehehehe
Does she do it every day?
Alison Kay (02:56.356)
sounds nice. Vanilla, okay. I was going to ask, did you put any spices in vanilla? It’s just smooth. That’s a smooth choice. I have not had tapioca since I went to first school, I don’t think. And I used to love the little balls in there, but I’ve not eaten it since then. Maybe I should try and look and see if I can get some around here. I don’t know. It was nice.
Andrea (03:02.924)
Yeah, just the vanilla. that, yeah, I happened to have it.
Andrea (03:13.166)
Whoa.
Yeah.
Andrea (03:22.594)
Yeah, well, the hard part is finding good tapioca balls because a lot of them are just trash. So and there’s a seller in the US that was selling them way back when I first got married that doesn’t sell them anymore. So then it took me several years before I found a place again. Now I’m getting them from Azure. But there’s also Bob’s Red Mill sells some really good ones for people in the US. So, yeah.
Alison Kay (03:28.504)
Yeah… Now that’s fine.
Alison Kay (03:43.182)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Andrea (03:51.524)
but they’re delicious. So I made that yesterday, big pot, and there was only one little container left by the end of the day. So I ate a little bowl of that for breakfast today. It’s quite filling with all those egg yolks and very golden and eggy. And Leah is here, who’s a podcast listener and she lives in Alaska and she’s here with her three little kids. So we were eating it together and her
Alison Kay (03:53.792)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Kay (03:58.464)
Alison Kay (04:06.911)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (04:10.943)
creamy.
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (04:20.554)
son whose three was crumbling his sausage into the tapioca so if you need a different experience then you could put sausage in there actually looked pretty good not gonna lie it looked pretty good
Alison Kay (04:31.621)
Sounds good.
It sounds like one of Gable’s combinations. He does like banana and miso. On the rare occasions I let him at a banana. So sausage and vanilla is with it too.
Andrea (04:39.18)
Okay! Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah. Well, maybe it’s just a boy thing.
Alison Kay (04:49.18)
Perhaps, Okay, before we start, yeah. Well, exactly. Rob is kind of a work in progress, as is all of the things that we do here. know, we’re just making decisions as we feel best and as we feel kind of good making them. So yeah, Rob’s put a different, slightly different sign up on our website, ancestralkitchenpodcast.com for the newsletter. It looks a bit more glittery.
Andrea (04:50.34)
Yeah. Can you tell me about the newsletter? You guys added something to the website. So I want to mention that.
Alison Kay (05:17.882)
And that is in progress. We are going to be sending out emails semi-regularly, not like in your inbox all the time, but we’ve got, the two of us have got some great ideas for the content that we’re going to put in that that will help you, inspire you and move you forward. So if you would like to hear from us, stay in touch with us and hear more of what we’re up to, then do go to our website.
ancestralkitchenpodcast.com and pop your name and email address up on the, there’s a box in the top of every page so you can find it however you get to us and you can listen to some episodes while you’re there too. So yeah, that’s a reminder.
Andrea (05:58.416)
And we won’t spam you because we can’t we don’t have time We have to go in and write them by hand and we’re like when Shall we be doing this? So we will not be spamming you Well, Allison, this is gonna be such an awesome episode and I actually just got a message from a Podcast listener the other day. She was voxering me. Shout out to Aria and she said why
Alison Kay (06:02.316)
No. No, exactly. Yeah.
Yeah, no, exactly.
Alison Kay (06:18.572)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Kay (06:22.582)
Mm.
Andrea (06:27.118)
get out of supermarkets. And I said, funny, you should ask because we’re about to record a new episode on it. She went back and listened to episode nine, which is way back in the beginning of our saga on here. And she said, wow, that episode was really, really good and super helpful. And I can’t wait for the next one. So this is actually this topic. Allison is actually following up on that previous episode.
Alison Kay (06:28.983)
you
Alison Kay (06:55.433)
Yeah, yeah, we’re doing it again.
Andrea (06:57.57)
So why are we talking about it again? Why?
Alison Kay (07:00.776)
Well, I think the main thing is because it’s so important for us to engage in local, sane food supplies, not in mass market media, just for money food supplies. So it’s just, it’s really, really important. And so I keep wanting to banging on about it, keep wanting to banging on about it. But I think it came up again for me recently because listeners will know I moved back from Italy.
Andrea (07:23.193)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Alison Kay (07:29.894)
to the UK last summer. And when we landed in the UK, I had to use supermarkets. And my gosh, that was a shock. And that was horrible. And you’ll hear more about that a little bit later. But that just made me think this is so wrong. We’ve got to do another episode on it. And I think you used them as well during when you were postpartum, Andrea, is that right?
Andrea (07:50.245)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (07:55.95)
Yeah, and it wasn’t as painful for me because I didn’t actually have to go in because I would place the order and somebody, my sister or somebody in town would pick it up. But it still didn’t. It was it it I felt that the food was beyond lackluster. It startled me because I kind of forgot. So.
Alison Kay (08:02.972)
I see.
Alison Kay (08:15.886)
Yeah, beyond.
Alison Kay (08:19.999)
I also think, you know, supermarkets are huge monsters and as individuals it can often seem very difficult for us to fight against huge monsters. But any small thing we can do, both of us and everyone really who’s engaged in the mission that we have here, is really important and we want to do it. So that’s why, another reason why we’re doing another episode. And lastly, because people have been asking for it, you know, when we talk to
supporters on the Discord forum that we have, they are actively trying to get out of supermarkets further every single day. And any support that we can give, you know, our supporters and everyone who’s listening to make a change, even if it’s just a small percent is worth it. So to try and get as much information as possible for this episode, I put a survey out to our supporters and I just wanted to start by thanking everyone.
who responded to that survey, actually take the time to answer my questions and tell me where they’re at and tell me what their problems are. And to everyone who’s talked about this on our Discord forum, it’s been so useful for me to bring it all together in this episode. What we’re gonna talk about Andrea is why you’d wanna get out of supermarkets, the things that can stop us and how to work on those things. And then we are going to talk.
Andrea (09:34.992)
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Alison Kay (09:43.707)
solid practical ways that you can get out of supermarkets. We’ll talk about how both of us, Andrea, you as a small farm owner and mother of four, and me as part of a marriage with Rob where we’re two small business owners who just prioritise our creativity and both of us are homeschooling, how we do it practically. We’ll talk about something else that we’re asked a lot about. How do you approach farmers and how do you not feel awkward asking them about
or how they feed their animals, how their animals live. And also lots of people have asked about getting away from Amazon and also buying other things like clothes and electronics. And we wanted to talk about that too. The podcast supporters have a lot to share about shopping for other things other than groceries outside the big stores. When I did this plan for this episode, we couldn’t get it all in.
Andrea (10:23.514)
Hmm
Alison Kay (10:42.339)
At the end of the episode, there’ll be an exclusive after show for our supporters where we’ll talk about Amazon. So if you’d love to hear that after show and you want to support us to keep this podcast going because you love what we’re up to and help us make it bigger, do come and join us on our second tier or above level on Patreon.
Okay, so let’s start with a brief history of supermarkets because the shocking thing when we live in this day and age is that we think the things that are around us have just been there forever, but they haven’t. Supermarkets are really quite recent. The first one was in 1930, which is less than hundred years ago, Andrea, can you believe that?
Andrea (11:20.602)
Wow.
Andrea (11:24.888)
I cannot. That makes us in this generation outliers. We’ve gotten food in a different way than anybody in the history of the world has and that’s kind of disturbing.
Alison Kay (11:30.819)
Mm.
Alison Kay (11:38.646)
Yeah, I agree. And like I said, now we think it’s just normal. I listened to a podcast, one of the kind of foodie podcasts, and there was an olive oil distributor on there called Elizabeth Berger. And she was talking about how she got her olive oil into people’s homes. she, talking about supermarkets, she said, it’s how people shop. That’s what we do in life. With this kind of resigned tone that, well, you just have to do it this way.
people don’t question the supermarket. They don’t think there’s another way. But like you just said, for basically the whole of history up to a hundred years ago, there were no supermarkets. And so people have been doing it another way for most of our ancestors life, know, most of human life on earth. So there definitely is another way.
Andrea (12:33.739)
And as you kind of alluded to a minute ago, even more recent evolution is that it’s turning into that with Amazon, too, for all the things people buy. so that will be fun to talk about in the after show. Just discussing a little bit of the aspect.
Alison Kay (12:49.981)
Yeah, I’ve got some really interesting things from the patrons and supporters to bring to that. So I want to talk a little bit about why we need to move away from them. And as I said earlier, this is drawn from really my experience on returning to England. I had very little choice because I didn’t have farmers. I just kind of landed in Rob’s mum house with Gabriel and Rob and all our stuff. And it was just horrible going to those supermarkets.
Andrea (12:55.728)
Yeah, good, good.
Alison Kay (13:21.661)
I can run through some of the negatives, Andrea, if you want me to talk with them. Yeah.
Andrea (13:22.496)
my gosh. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask you because you’ve kind of said one or two things when we would get on on you at rant about our there’s pairs from Persia or something. So maybe tell me what what things happen.
Alison Kay (13:31.419)
Yes. You listen to my rants more often than the rest of the podcast listeners, which is nice. So yeah, the first thing I think is the choice. I was just bewildered by the choice walking into a supermarket having not been in one for quite some time. Choice generally to have that amount choice in life, I do not think is a good thing. I remember reading in a
Andrea (13:53.904)
Ugh.
Alison Kay (14:01.239)
a B Wilson book that, she wanted to get some jam for something. And she went into the supermarket and she saw like, I don’t know about 50 different jams. And she was like, I don’t, don’t know which one to have this one. She’d have this one. She was just in like analysis paralysis, trying to figure out which jam to have. And she’d said, you know, if they were just like six jams, then I just would have felt a lot better about the whole situation because.
Andrea (14:10.352)
Sheesh.
Alison Kay (14:29.343)
I could have just said, fancy blueberry, not raspberry. And that would have been the end of it. and when I read that quote, thought, imagine if you made the jam yourself, imagine how much more contented you’d be than having to make that choice. You know, that you just had a jam because you made it. I feel like the choice that’s put in front of us every day is not doing good things for our brains. We’ve also, we talked on the last episode about supermarkets about packaging and I’ll just give you some stats here.
I’ve got to try and figure out how to say these numbers. They’re so big. 158 million 943,925 tonnes of plastic waste will be created in 2023, that was, and 43 % of global plastic waste will be mismanaged at the end of its life, amounting to 68 million 642,999 additional tonnes of plastic in…
Andrea (15:03.907)
You
Andrea (15:14.306)
Jeez.
Alison Kay (15:29.147)
nature. The global average consumption of plastic per person per year is 20.9 kilos. What’s that in American, Andrea?
Andrea (15:31.161)
Ugh.
Wow.
Andrea (15:40.91)
that’s 50 pounds. But I looked to see what US stats say our usage is, and I got quite a different number, which was that says that in the US we use 110 pounds of plastic per year. So I’m not sure how the plastic was calculated. Maybe it was plastic single use waste or, you know, including your plastic clothes. I have no idea.
Alison Kay (15:43.381)
Okay.
Alison Kay (15:48.135)
Mm.
Alison Kay (15:54.954)
my gosh. That’s ridiculous.
Alison Kay (16:03.538)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (16:09.819)
Yeah, that is just, I mean, they’re just, those stats are astounding and none of that plastic’s degrading. All of it is ending up inside fish in our ocean, you know? So then there’s no need.
Andrea (16:12.73)
That’s a lot.
Andrea (16:18.8)
Yeah, that’s the depressing part. Remember that there’s 330 million Americans, so…
Alison Kay (16:25.639)
Yeah, that’s a lot of plastic. So plastic is a no brainer. The lights in the supermarket stressed me when I went in there, being away from them and listeners who’ve been with us for a while will know how I feel about kind of lights and screens and the lights do terrible things to people’s eyes and people’s brainwaves in supermarkets. The marketing, I felt like I was bombarded when I walked in those supermarkets. feel, and I looked around at the people around me and they just, they looked like…
Andrea (16:27.728)
Fantastic.
Alison Kay (16:54.131)
caught kind of sheep. They’re just pushing their trolleys around and they’re being led around the supermarket. And there’s this sign here, this sign here, this offer here. They’re just being kind of magnetized, guided to exactly how the people who run the supermarkets want them to be. You know, what do we want them to buy? And magically, the consumers end up buying it. So that is something that is not good for our society or our own kind of sanity, our own choice.
The array of vegetables from other places. And that’s what you were just talking about me ranting about. You know, I go into one of the ethical supermarkets in the UK and there were beans from Morocco, which is miles away from here. Sweet corn from India. And I went to see my sister quite soon after we came back to the UK. And on the way back, we wanted a piece of fruit for the train journey. And I went into a supermarket and we wanted to buy an apple.
Andrea (17:39.6)
Wow.
Alison Kay (17:54.739)
And the two apple choices were apples from Chile, which is 7,400 miles from the UK or apples from South Africa, which is 8,500 miles from the UK. And this was in summer. I know this is in summer. It wasn’t like it was, you know, the hungry gap and all the apples from the winter have gone. People still have apples in storage now. I’m still buying local apples at the market here.
Andrea (18:04.602)
Good grief.
When you live next door to Whales, which is like Apple capital. That’s crazy.
Andrea (18:18.853)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (18:24.87)
now in January and this was I think it was September and that’s just ridiculous. sourcing and pollution and all of the stuff that comes with that. The supermarket’s power is something that we need to be aware of. Four brands control 75 % of the food purchased in the UK. We are marketed to. They make it look like
We have choice, we do not have choice and that choice is getting, know, the choice that we do have if we have any is getting narrower and narrower and narrower. And those brands have control over the markets, over the farmers, over the prices. And that is scary. Next one, a long list here. We don’t have any interaction in the supermarket. We can go through the beeper yourself, check out. And that’s just so wrong. Humans are social beings and this is a transaction.
Andrea (19:14.185)
Ugh. The worst.
Alison Kay (19:19.398)
You know, when we know, see and talk to the people, it makes us human and food growing should be human. should be at a human level. It’s not being treated like that. And that’s how we got into the mess that we’re in with food systems. it, although it may be in this day and age, it seems easier to just go into a supermarket and not have to talk to anyone, but it’s a false thing and it’s creating a society that is
dislocated and it feels like it doesn’t have a grounding because that communication of community is not there. Food waste, supermarkets obviously generate lots of food waste themselves. Ellie, who is known for Ellie’s Every Day over in Australia, who’s the podcast friend, did work for some time for a supermarket redistributor. You know, there are companies that redistribute supermarket waste to the needy.
But also there is a ton of refuse vegetables that then become classified as farm waste. You know, if the apples are too small, if your cauliflower is too creamy, if there’s a bit of black on something and the farms that grow those cannot sell those. So those just get wasted. Next one is just the supermarkets drive exploitation of farmers, of animals and of our land. We
Andrea (20:33.04)
Ugh.
Alison Kay (20:45.693)
don’t often see that happening because we don’t engage necessarily with the farmers who that’s happening to. We don’t live next door to the land where that’s happening to. But if we buy from supermarkets, we are condoning the exploitation that they create. For example, I heard a stat that half of the milk in UK supermarkets comes from cows that never go outside.
Andrea (21:14.254)
What? That is horrible.
Alison Kay (21:15.367)
which is just, and I don’t think people shopping in supermarkets, buying milk, realise that half of the milk is from cows that never go outside. if they went and actually saw that cow never going outside, they might think differently. Exactly.
Andrea (21:22.798)
No.
Andrea (21:31.162)
They’d never buy that milk again. If you saw those cows udders, just as someone who’s spent a little time around cows, there’s not something very appealing about drinking from those udders versus the nice clean udders of a cow in a small herd on grass.
Alison Kay (21:36.211)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (21:52.828)
And that is another thing, the herd sizes. So Patrick Holden, who I interviewed a few episodes back last year, I think, he’s a dairy, he runs an organic dairy farm in Wales. And he said, when herds number 500 or more, with some of them being thousands of cows, the consequences of this industrial scale are inevitable, increased pollution, welfare issues, and a whole range of negative social impacts in rural communities, all with stories of supermarkets.
wouldn’t want to know about. And when we go there and we buy that stuff, we are supporting that to continue to happen and continue to grow. Andrew, I’ve talked a lot. Do you feel the same about everything I’ve said? think I know I’ve talked to you enough. Do you want to add anything to it?
Andrea (22:42.032)
do. I will say yes. So Sir Patrick Holden, you interviewed him on episode 46. And I’m popping that in the show notes. But you also interviewed his wife on episode 61. And they actually have a herd of cows. So he knows where from he speaks. And, and I agree completely. So all the things that you said, I feel like the the stress
Alison Kay (22:47.781)
Thank you.
Alison Kay (23:00.154)
near.
Andrea (23:09.208)
of decision making in the store on the fly, like B. Wilson described with the jam. And we do know from psychology studies that people feel less satisfied with their decisions when they have to decide from a wide array of things versus a small array. And it is a modern sort of a deception that we think having more choices will make me happier. But actually having fewer choices is what brings more satisfaction. I feel like
the impulse buys that happen in the store. It’s less of a problem now that I don’t like anything that’s there, but it certainly can blow your budget if you’re in there and you see something on the end cap made to sell to you and you add it to your cart and buy it. the feeling of, well, I’m here in the store, so I guess I’ll get this cause I’m here now. And then
Alison Kay (23:47.448)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (23:56.432)
Mm-mm.
Alison Kay (24:04.5)
Yeah.
Andrea (24:06.65)
those beeping machines and the glaring lights and all those zillions of products on the shelves. I looked online and Walmart carries an average of 100,000 products. It’s a lot of decisions, but it’s basically a stimulation nightmare going in there. And you’re usually walking on concrete and there’s just a lot of other stressed out people around you, which doesn’t help. then for anybody who’s a
Alison Kay (24:08.479)
Mm-mm.
Andrea (24:36.336)
somewhat conscious of what they’re buying and starting to, you know, become eyes wide open, then you’re reading packages and trying to read between the lines to see how they’re trying to trick you and lie to you now. How did they rename corn syrup today so that you, the aware consumer don’t know what you’re buying and all the obfuscating language that goes on packaging.
make you think it’s a good thing when maybe it isn’t. So yeah, I’m right there with you.
Alison Kay (25:11.878)
Yeah, absolutely. All of it. I agree with you. I want to share another quote from Sir Patrick Holden now to kind of move us onto the next bit. He said, many years ago when I was running the Soil Association, I had the good fortune to meet the then chief executive of Tesco’s. Tesco is a leading, the leading UK supermarket, Sir Terry Leahy. Over a cup of tea,
I politely suggested that Tesco’s policies were in danger of putting small and medium-sized UK farms out of business. His response stuck in my mind. He said, what do you expect us to do? We are stuck between a rock and two hard places, our customers who want ever cheaper food and our shareholders who demand better returns on their investments and our competitors who will gain market share unless we drop our prices.
I just think that’s an amazing thing for the CEO of Tesco to say. And I want to ask who decided that all of what I’ve just described is what we want for our land, our animals and our farmers. Because this, everything we just talked about is not food. Another B. Wilson quote that I…
Andrea (26:22.51)
Hmm.
Alison Kay (26:35.403)
I read two of her books this summer. She said, food is only food when a human says it is, and that human is you. That I think is so powerful because she’s right. Who decided that this was food? We’re humans and we know what food is. Our bodies know what food is really. And each of us has the ability to say, that’s not food. I’m not going in there. That’s not food.
Andrea (26:45.2)
Hmm.
Alison Kay (27:05.126)
Even if it’s a banana or an apple, the way that it’s been sourced, the way that it’s been bought, the way that it’s marketed and everything else that’s in that building, that’s not food. And that’s why we’re doing another episode. So I feel like…
Andrea (27:18.283)
Yes, it’s food that it’s things things that were in inhumanely treated and you’re inhumanely treated in order to get it and you have to behave a bit like a machine and the marketers calculate you like you’re a machine and humanity doesn’t come into it and I think that’s what’s so disturbing about it all.
Alison Kay (27:43.793)
Yeah. Slightly further on in that article, and the Patrick Holden, I shared the quote from, he said that the same Tesco CEO said, supermarkets are like Pavlov’s dog. They’re just doing what the customer demands. And, you know, aside from the fact that, you know, he’s doing that job and he could choose not to do that job and do something else. He’s pushing away responsibility from himself saying, it’s not my fault. It’s the customer’s fault. It’s the shareholders’ fault. It’s everyone else’s fault.
This is the main issue here that we need to take personal responsibility. Everyone in the world does. The CEO of Tesco isn’t taking responsibility. The customers aren’t taking responsibility. The day that I went to my sister and had that experience with the apples on the way home, she said to me, the government needs to do something. The customers aren’t taking responsibility. The government listens to the industrial food lobby because they’ve got all the money. They listen to them all day.
They’re the people who donate to their parties and keep them going. And the governments say, there’s not customer demand. So we just go around in this ridiculous circle. And we need to just cut the circle up and say, every single person needs to take personal responsibility. And when you do, everything changes. Our experience, both of us, of shopping locally, of trying to find farmers, of doing our best to get out of supermarkets, it’s so empowering.
Andrea (28:47.704)
Uh-huh.
Alison Kay (29:10.111)
It connects you, it connects you with your food, connects you with the land around you, it connects you with individuals, it connects you with your community, it connects you with the animals, it connects you with nature. Literally, changing how I buy my food has changed my life. It’s changed my relationship with food immensely. And that’s just full of joy. And I can’t imagine a supermarket.
bring joy to anyone and yet all of these other things when you do take responsibility they bring you so much. Ali who’s a patron said in the response to the survey that I put out you’re likely to have a positive interaction with another happy human and there’s such a deficiency of that in our world today totally and then Kirsten who lives in Canada she said I’m excited
Andrea (29:57.796)
That is so true. So true.
Alison Kay (30:04.914)
by how much I’ve learned this year since joining the Ancestral Kitchen community. Once you discover that there are alternatives, you do not want to go back. It’s so exciting and makes food and shopping so much more meaningful. Completely. Okay, let’s go to an outbreak.
Alison Kay (30:27.344)
Okay, so having talked about all the reasons why we want to get out supermarkets, let’s talk about what needs to shift in us in order to enable that transition. And the first thing that we’ve identified is our expectations. It’s a big one, right? So the way that we live at the moment, we expect to have whatever we want. We have become people, as we’ve talked about many times, Andrea,
Andrea (30:43.062)
boy. Yes.
Alison Kay (30:56.655)
preparing food to a recipe. I want to make that recipe, I’m going to go and buy the stuff. Picking what we fancy. Yet throughout history, people cooked what was available or they preserved what was available. And when that wasn’t available, well, they cooked what was available. It’s a completely different way of being. I’ve got another quote here, which is again, me Wilson.
Andrea (31:16.9)
Right.
Alison Kay (31:24.846)
She says, magical as it is, I’ve come to feel entitled to this abundance. On the rare occasions that I arrive at one of these shops and the one specific thing I was expecting to buy has run out, no Parmesan left on a Sunday night, outrageous. I feel a mild consternation because my expectation to eat exactly what I want at the precise moment I want to eat it has been scuppered. I think that describes that so well. And I I feel that I
I grew up like that and until I started changing the way I ate, that’s what I wanted. You know, I went into the supermarket and if what I planned to eat wasn’t there, I’d be grumpy. And it just, requires us to let go of those expectations. Understand those expectations have been placed on us by the society that we live in and all of our ancestors didn’t have that. They cooked what was around.
Andrea (32:04.1)
Hmm.
Andrea (32:19.074)
No. I love what Jess said. One of our podcast supporters. She said, I usually just cook what I find. Ha!
Alison Kay (32:22.452)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alison Kay (32:30.934)
Completely.
Andrea (32:32.73)
Yeah, sounds about right. And that’s, that is what the cookbook that you and I wrote is about is if you look through that, you can pretty much tell what you and I are around a lot because it was the…
Alison Kay (32:40.085)
Mm.
Andrea (32:50.978)
Recipes that came out of stuff you and I were making over and over and over because that’s what we tended to have a good supply of you can get a good supply of minced meat you had a really great supply of tomatoes and things like that in Italy and I have a good supply of turkeys so So it it’s not that somebody has to go get a turkey but When you’re around turkeys, here’s a way to do it, you know
Alison Kay (33:00.118)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alison Kay (33:15.826)
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what I think what we try to get across in the book. there’s any listener out there who hasn’t got the book yet, they can go to, they are going to, okay. Well, if they want to their friends about it, they can go to the shop section of Ancestral Kitchen podcast. I think it’s forward slash shop and Meals at the Ancestral Hearth is our first cookbook. May there be more in the future that we do together. That would be fun.
Andrea (33:23.976)
no, Allison, they’ve all bought two copies. I know it. Yeah, tell your friends. Tell your friends to buy two copies.
Andrea (33:41.508)
May there be more. It was really fun. Yeah, I really like doing that with you.
Alison Kay (33:45.251)
It was. And with that, you know, comes the ability to cook what’s around you. And that’s something we learn just by doing it and failing sometimes and hopefully having family who are forgiving and will eat it or will eat it or the chickens will eat it if it goes terribly wrong. But in order to do that, in order to have the energy to improvise and be in the kitchen with those ingredients and create something, we have to…
have the space, the head space and the energy to do it. And that leads to another thing that kind of needs to shift in order for us to be able to shop this way, which is our priorities. The first one is the kind of obvious one, our time. It’s a big one. And it’s the reason most people, including myself, have sighted and do sight for not being able to get out of supermarkets as much as they would like to.
Andrea (34:33.509)
Bye.
Alison Kay (34:44.978)
And you know, this for me, time priorities are a constant work in progress, prioritizing all of the things that we all have in our life, you know, prioritizing bringing money in, prioritizing my family, prioritizing homeschooling, prioritizing my creativity, actually putting food on the table, keeping the house clean, doing all the admin that life involves, actually seeing my husband, exercising, being outside. Everyone has…
those priorities that they’re juggling. And for me, I forgot sleep, didn’t I? For me, it’s something that I question every day. Am I forgetting this? And I know that if I’ve forgotten, sort of left my creativity behind a bit, and I realise I get grumpier or get naughtier, things are happening. If we forget to go outside,
Andrea (35:18.678)
You’re supposed to sleep sometimes too, Allison.
Alison Kay (35:42.066)
that we get ill, our body tells us these things, our mind tells us these things. So it is a balance all the time. And I like to try to stay conscious and with that progress of shifting expectations and not stay in a rut that, I’ve done this in the past, so I have to continue doing it this way. that would be, that would be, no.
Andrea (36:00.72)
pretty sure you could just take a pill or something. Have an emotion pill and have a exercise pill.
Alison Kay (36:07.747)
Exercise pill, yeah. Life would be sadder, simpler, but sadder. Very sad. I think that the way that I like to try and sort of knock a lot of things on the head at the same time is to creatively combine the things. So when we go to the market, we go, all three of us on a Saturday and it’s, we’re outside.
Andrea (36:14.543)
Ugh, so sad.
Alison Kay (36:36.545)
and we’re walking and it’s quite a walk and we’re talking to our community and we’re having time together. Sometimes we will stop on the way back and get a cup of tea somewhere occasionally. If we’ve got washing that is, pause with rain here, one of the downsides of living in the UK all the time. So if we’ve got washing that is wet and we can’t dry it, we’ll take the washing and we’ll go to the dryer and put it in. We’ll use that time.
not only to get our food, but also to be together, to have fun together, to be outside and to exercise. And that’s a win-win in so many different perspectives. I know that you do that, Andrea, you kind of combine things together. Can you talk a little bit about how that plays out in your life?
Andrea (37:23.982)
Yes. So I, it’s, if you think about the way things were done and the way things are done now, now we have to quickly get our food from the grocery store so that we can set aside a chunk of time to exercise. But exercise used to be what happened when you were trying to get food. So we’ve now cut everything up into little pieces and put it into separate trays.
Alison Kay (37:40.802)
Mm.
Alison Kay (37:45.58)
Yeah.
Andrea (37:54.088)
And we get so confused when we try to mix them again the way that they used to be, but you could once upon a time walk to a market or to a goat pen or wherever through the woods, picking berries, trying to collect and gather and find your food. Then it slowly turned into going to one place and driving to get there.
Alison Kay (38:08.258)
Hmm.
Alison Kay (38:12.353)
Yeah.
Andrea (38:25.24)
So little by little, then had to, now you have to shop really fast or get it delivered so that you have time to go walk on a spinning hamster wheel for 45 minutes and then take your antidepressants because you never went outside and your body is begging for that. You know what I mean? So this is kind of how my brain thinks about that. And then when we do our town days,
Alison Kay (38:36.386)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (38:46.845)
Hmm.
Andrea (38:54.682)
which you’re referring to here, think, just to cut down on going places and doing things overall, one of the things I found an inclination to was, you know, if you set up a special trip and go somewhere, then you or I would think, well, I guess I’m here. I’ll get this since I’m here. But if I just stopped by there on my way, then I might look at it and say, well, it isn’t what I wanted. I’m not going to get it and move on.
Alison Kay (39:22.907)
Yeah.
Andrea (39:23.802)
But you know, if I took two hours to come into town, then I’m like, I’ll just have to do. So we kind of lump everything together into one town day so that we go once. And if it doesn’t fit, then it doesn’t happen. And I, by fit, mean physically fit in the car for the long drive home and also fit in the day. Cause it’s a very limited and finite time that I have to do all those errands.
So it does help a bit. when the baby was new, one of the errands was picking up groceries and it was fine. I think because like it, didn’t feel as bad as it could have because I knew it was a short-term thing, but ultimately I was staggered.
buy how expensive it is to buy food at the grocery store and also how disappointing all the food was. So it felt like not only are you spending more money, but you’re unhappier at the end of the day. And, but when we would go on our, which we still do our one day of errands, you know, we’ll do Jacob’s organ lessons. We’ll see the chiropractor.
Alison Kay (40:36.376)
you
Alison Kay (40:46.144)
Okay, yep.
Andrea (40:48.782)
I’ll go buy tea if I’m out of tea, whatever little errands we we pack food. We make two dozen muffins once a week for that trip and and then everybody can bring water. so that’s one of the harder things with going into town and doing errands. I’m sure you’ve encountered this is that you have to bring your food.
Alison Kay (41:10.774)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea (41:14.928)
because you’re either going to spend an absolutely insane amount of money to eat somewhere and it will be disappointing and gross or I suppose you could eat at a fast food place and really be disappointed and probably still be really expensive. so
Alison Kay (41:30.04)
Yeah.
I can’t tell you how many cool bags we’ve been through. I literally, we just, especially in Italy, where it’s really, really hot in the summer, the amount of, you know, every time we leave the house, basically we got a cool bag with an ice, yeah, a cool bag with an ice block in it. So yeah, we have like the fabric one, so they’re easy for Rob to put over his shoulder, you know, or for Gable to carry. But yeah, we are doing that all the time to just take our own food with us. Absolutely.
Andrea (41:36.676)
Yeah. What bags?
Andrea (41:43.257)
cool bags.
cooler.
Andrea (41:52.452)
Yeah.
Andrea (42:00.334)
Yeah, it’s it’s the only way to go. But the more times I go into town and because every time we go to town, basically, no matter how we slice it, we end up having to bring a meal pretty much. Then I try to lump everything together so that I don’t have to pack, you know, six meals a week or something.
Alison Kay (42:10.469)
Mm.
Alison Kay (42:18.511)
I think what’s interesting is what if you don’t get to do all those tasks, what happens to the ones that fall off? Do you do them the next week or do they just not ever happen?
Andrea (42:27.384)
Yeah, either one. Either they just don’t ever happen or they happen the next week. But that’s about it. Okay.
Alison Kay (42:30.161)
Hmm. I think that kind of leads me to what I wanted to say next, which was really be ruthless with the tasks that you have to do to prioritize your time. Look at every single thing that you’re doing. Does this really need to be done? Rob’s taught me a lot with that because, you when I met him, if there was time in a day to do three things, I’d pack in 12. And it’s been many years of him.
Andrea (42:40.687)
Yes.
Andrea (42:48.08)
Exactly.
Andrea (42:56.718)
Hmm.
Alison Kay (43:00.305)
kind of trying to say to me, life’s better when you don’t do that and do those things really need doing? you don’t, you don’t. Exactly. We’ll talk specifically about time-saving shopping strategies in the next section, but that’s what I wanted to say really about priorities for time. The other big priority, of course, is money, our money.
Andrea (43:04.942)
I want to meet that Allison.
Poor thing. Poor Allison of the past.
Alison Kay (43:29.606)
And that again is something that is the same with the time we need to seriously think about is how we’re spending our money, how we’re spending our time, does it reflect what we value? Because we feel better when how we spend our time and our money actually aligns with how we feel inside. We have talked a lot about saving money.
The two highlight episodes on that were 50 ways to save money, are episode 66 and 67. So if you haven’t listened to those or you want to go back and have a refresher, download those two and listen to them again, because those will help you greatly. And so many people commented about those episodes and how helpful they were to just systematically go through what you’re spending your money on and how you can save money.
Andrea (44:18.96)
And our next episode will be really helpful in this regards too. So if you’re listening to this in real time, it hasn’t come out yet. If you’re listening to it as a back episode, then look for, I believe it’ll be episode 103, which will cover some other helpful things. Yeah.
Alison Kay (44:22.356)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (44:31.883)
The next one. Yeah. Yeah. I’m looking forward to that one. Awesome. Sometimes, know, it’s, patrons have told me this and I’ve experienced it myself. It’s a specific food that’s a problem with getting out of supermarkets. So for example, dairy, a lot of, um, patrons have told me Hannah’s told me, Kelly’s told me, and other supporters have told me that, you know, they can get their veg from this place. They can get their meat from a farm. They can get their grains from a mill, but
dairy, they have not been able to source economically elsewhere. And so, so we will talk a little bit about that in the next section, but we are experiencing that problem at the moment, having just moved to a new area. And that’s what we’re this kind of edge of what we’re fighting with, with supermarkets at the moment. Are we changing our diet up? Are we changing our suppliers? How are we, how are we dealing with that? For some people getting out of supermarkets is harder.
Andrea (45:03.088)
Hmm
Okay
Andrea (45:15.578)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (45:31.627)
much harder and certainly we acknowledge that, not everyone has, it’s so easy to go and find farmers. I mean, it’s not been easy for either of us crafting lifestyles like this, but I know that, you know, if you live in the middle of a massive city and there are food deserts and we understand that and there are also, there’s also great food inequality. There are many people who can’t,
Andrea (45:36.794)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Kay (46:01.751)
afford to pay what the farmer needs in order to make a living doing what they’re doing. But I think, you know, as we speak to podcast listeners who most of them want to get out of supermarkets and as we speak to the vast numbers of people in this world who have substantial amounts of money, those people are spending it on
things that are more expensive than buying food locally. So for example, the US spends 50 % of its food budget on eating out. Andrew, you’ve got something on that, haven’t you?
Andrea (46:43.632)
That’s my people.
Yeah, I was trying to find how much money Americans actually spend on food. And I don’t know if this is the most accurate, but it’s the best number I could find. Americans spend an average of $3,639 eating out each year. The average American household spends half of that on eating out. Which is… Yeah, so then when I look at that and I think, well, my household is bigger.
Alison Kay (46:54.457)
Mmm.
Alison Kay (47:08.159)
Gosh. Okay, so.
Andrea (47:16.976)
So I definitely exceed that, but.
Alison Kay (47:17.061)
Mm-mm. I’m astounded when I look at that figure, because I divide that by 12 and I think about how much money that is a month and I’m thinking, people spend that just on eating out. That’s astounding.
Andrea (47:25.562)
think about how much it would be. Yeah.
Andrea (47:31.768)
Well, lot of people, Gary’s told me a lot of people, you know, I pack his lunch every day when I make dinner. I make dinner and I pack Gary’s lunch and then I serve dinner. like his lunch is packed before we even eat. And he said most people just buy food for lunch. So think about that. That’ll trickle away at your budget real quick.
Alison Kay (47:39.561)
Hmm.
Alison Kay (47:50.131)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alison Kay (47:55.069)
Yeah, I completely. And so we acknowledge that it’s not easy for everyone and not everyone has the budget, but we also see figures like that and think there is enough leeway in this system to make a huge difference to supermarkets bottom line.
Andrea (48:06.47)
my gosh, if you used a quarter of that money to buy a butchered cow.
And then you used like $800 out of that for a fat CSA.
Okay, there you got meat and veg handled. Now you’re gonna drop a thousand dollar order on Azure and get a bunch of grains.
Okay, now you’ve got your grains covered and then you can get sweeteners while you’re at it. You can get maybe a bucket of honey or something. mean, yeah, but we’re not taught that. We’re not taught that. And we’re taught that we can’t and that we’re, you know, we’re too dumb. We can’t figure it out, which is very insulting.
Alison Kay (48:44.834)
Yeah, it’s just nothing. It’s no comparison.
Alison Kay (48:56.438)
Yeah. Well, we’re just marketed to so we think there’s no other choice. We think there’s no other way. That’s how people do it these days, isn’t it? They go to supermarkets. So yeah, despite all of that, exactly, that’s how I used to do it as well for a very long time. Despite all those things, you know, and there’s also, mean, Katie, who’s a patron in Germany has said that, the government there is very strict on what is available and what you can buy. So there’s that as well. But I think we know…
Andrea (49:06.35)
Yeah, I mean, that’s how I did it for the forever. Yeah.
Andrea (49:22.16)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (49:24.674)
that there is always something you could do. So I wanna talk about that in the next section.
Alison Kay (49:33.496)
Okay, so let’s talk about practical ways to get out of supermarkets. All of the things that we’re going to talk about need time. They are not as quick as a trip to Walmart or a quick trip to Tesco’s if you’re over this side of the Atlantic. It’s about priorities. But is a battle we are all at the front of every day. So we know what it’s like and we want to try and support you as much.
as we can to help in just the little ways we can. So first of all, look to your own sphere. So for example, you can go out and forage. You were just talking about berries, Andrea. You can go and look for berries. You can go and find out greens that you can forage and you can forage. Look in your own town. I think it’s easy to just get caught up in the supermarkets and not remember that a lot of towns still
have shops. I was just talking to Amelia, a patron who lives in Wales and she’s buying things from a local kind of a loose store, you know, where you’d go with your own containers and they’ve got grains and pulses and oil and this and you fill it up and that’s in one of her local towns. So do look in your town and see what’s there. Go into the shops, see what they sell. There’s a loose shop here in Stroud where I live. There’s lots of other places here in Stroud.
Andrea (50:35.748)
That’s true.
Andrea (50:47.121)
yeah.
Alison Kay (51:02.022)
But just a caveat to that, beware of projects from local stores not being local. Now I think Andrea, someone asked you about this on a KTC live we did and what did you say to that? Because it was really good what you said.
Andrea (51:15.108)
Yeah.
Andrea (51:20.492)
I don’t remember if I’ll say exactly what I said on the KTC live, if you join our Patreon and listen to 150 episodes somewhere, you’ll find it. But I always recommend ask, even if you’re at a farmer’s market or at a farm stand, what is produced here? And I am sympathetic to these farmers because they are fighting an uphill battle.
Alison Kay (51:22.136)
Mm. Okay.
to go back and listen to it. Somewhere it’s there.
Andrea (51:48.782)
battle against customer expectations. And as farmers, they spend the bulk of their time just educating people, which kind of gets exhausting. But many market stands feel that they have to concede to the customer demand and stock a variety of things or out of season things because people come in every March and ask for tomatoes. And if they don’t have the tomatoes and people say, I guess I’ll just do my shopping at Walmart or Tesco’s and off they go. And you’ve lost that customer.
Alison Kay (52:08.395)
Yeah.
Andrea (52:19.246)
I don’t, I’m not saying that I think that’s what the farm stands should be doing. I’m just saying I’m very sympathetic to it. So most of the farm stands that I know, if they carry a variety of things, they mark very clearly where it’s from. I remember a market in Virginia where I was shocked to find tomatoes early in the year. And I said, wow, you have tomatoes here. I think it was April. And she said, I don’t know.
They think they’re like from Chile or something. I was like what but she didn’t even know so of course they didn’t buy those but Then she felt like she had to stock it because people wanted it. So I know our audience is Totally based and our audience eats very differently than this average person So I know you guys are doing everything that you can to find out where your food comes from and what’s actually local and
what’s available in your area. But do ask just, you know, you could ask, hey, is this all stuff you guys grew or do you buy some of it in? And don’t sneer at them if they say that they bought some of it, you know, just say, great, I would love to buy the things you grow because I really want to support the local growers and and they’ll be happy to sell to you. So, yeah, just do ask.
Alison Kay (53:39.286)
thank you. Yeah, asking and talking. That’s the next thing I had down to say, talk to people, talk to the people at the farm stands and the shops, but also talk to people who live around you. You know, if you’re seeing them buying things or you go to someone to someone to eat with at their home, talk to them about where they’re buying stuff from. Because word of mouth, as you’ve experienced so many times, you talk to one person about milk.
Andrea (53:46.012)
yeah.
Alison Kay (54:07.238)
and then you find out about something to do with raw milk and then there’s another farmer and there’s another farmer. Talk to people. Buying groups are really useful. In several places where we’ve lived there have been existing buying groups. If there’s not a buying group, think about making one. You know, if you know one other person who is interested in getting something ethically, locally, then talk to them about the possibilities. Why don’t we do this together and buy more and get it for cheaper and then find some other people you’ll find.
Andrea (54:10.01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea (54:23.983)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (54:37.23)
If you talk to people about it, people will be magnetised to you. People who are interested.
Andrea (54:41.136)
And this is a this doesn’t have to be a fancy thing. My neighbor who lives farther down the gravel road than I do, she’ll text me every once in a while and say, hey, I’m going to the farmers market on Saturday because she knows I’m probably not going to be able to drive out. And she’ll say, you know, here’s the list of everything our farmer has because she has her favorite farmers. And she says, if you want me to pick you up anything. And so I’ll go stick cash in an envelope.
Alison Kay (54:58.022)
Mm.
Andrea (55:10.276)
down by the gate or something and she’ll pick it up on her way out and then she’ll come back and she’ll leave, you know, the box of food by the gate. And then the other day she messaged me and said, hey, a friend of mine, there’s a good friends of ours and hers that has a farm. And so she says, hey, I’m going to go pick up some big boxes of potatoes and cabbages and celery root, things like that.
Alison Kay (55:35.263)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (55:35.412)
And do you want anything? And so I just say, yeah. And then she’ll just buy big bins and then she kind of mixes it up and divides it for both of us. So we both get kind of a mix. So it’s not real official or formal, but it’s getting food in both of our homes. And it’s from people we know. And it’s from people around here. And then there’s only one car has to drive out the road. And, you know, just everything about it is good. And it’s easy for that farmer because he’s got one transaction to handle. You know, it’s a win, win, win.
Alison Kay (55:41.343)
nice.
Alison Kay (55:52.979)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (55:56.873)
Yeah, absolutely.
Alison Kay (56:02.751)
Yeah, and he’s selling more in the end probably because you probably wouldn’t have gone out there. Farmers markets, that’s the obvious one, but a lot of people can’t get, say they can’t get to farmers markets. So you really do have to plan for this. You know, if there’s someone you know who can go and get you stuff, like you’ve just said, maybe they can go for you. If there’s, if your farmers market in your town, you can’t get to, maybe there’s one in the next town that’s on the day you can get, maybe you can swap up what you’re doing, you know, at work to manage to get
Andrea (56:05.732)
yeah, definitely. Yep.
Andrea (56:17.124)
Yeah, that’s true.
Alison Kay (56:32.312)
Thursday mornings at eight o’clock or whenever it is off, or you can put the kids together with some other kids in another house and kind of take it in turns and go to the farmer’s market. You need to plan to make that possible. The last one around you talking about kind of your current, your circle is think about taking it on yourself. Kelly talked to me about making her own cheese, you know, because dairy was a big thing for her. And I’ve talked about dairy being a difficult.
Andrea (56:40.762)
Haha. Yeah.
Andrea (56:59.673)
you
Alison Kay (57:01.901)
thing with a lot of people, like the last thing that really you’re relying on supermarkets for. Think about taking that on yourself. Making cheese is a skill that once you’ve learned it, you’ve got it for life and you don’t have to do complicated cheeses. You can start with just a farmer’s cheese and slowly build up that repertoire and knowledge when you have the time. You can grow veg, you can take chickens on. Most of these are kind of long-term thing, but
Andrea (57:14.81)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Kay (57:29.313)
Really, when we feel like we feel about the food system, sometimes dedicating your life to it, that’s what we’re here for. I feel like part of the reason that we’ve ended up in Stroud here is very clearly because it’s got an amazing farmer’s market. And that’s been part of a lifetime’s journey for Rob and I and Gabriel since we’ve had him, you know, we’ve organised our life in a way
Andrea (57:39.524)
Yep.
Alison Kay (57:59.139)
that has made it possible for us to come to a town that we’ve never lived in before and be here because, partly because of the food scene, you know, that’s as we, yeah, as we start to kind of orientate our life in this way through our values, then slowly things can become easier because the choices that we make go in that direction.
Andrea (58:11.438)
Yeah, very much because of the food scene. Yeah.
Alison Kay (58:28.099)
you see what I mean. that make sense?
Andrea (58:28.624)
We have to be cautious as a person looking at somebody else and maybe feeling like our circumstances are different. We have to be cautious about saying things like if I were to say to you, well, it’s easy for you to prioritize food, Alice and you live in a town where you can walk to the farmer’s market and it’s a really good farmer’s market to which you would say the only reason I live here is because I was trying to find a town with a farmer’s market, you know, so
Alison Kay (58:37.716)
Mm.
Alison Kay (58:43.805)
Hmm.
Alison Kay (58:47.325)
Mm.
Alison Kay (58:53.179)
Yeah, yeah. The farmers market, yeah. And I’ve made sure I got a house that was close enough that I could walk there, because I don’t have a car.
Andrea (58:58.456)
So before we, yeah, yeah, I mean, I was a part of all those, like listening to those long conversations and those decisions. And it was and it was not easy for you to to find the place that checked all the boxes. And so, you know, of course, we do acknowledge that it’s not always as straightforward as you just do the right thing. But I want to caution anyone.
Alison Kay (59:06.003)
Hmm. Yeah.
Andrea (59:26.544)
who is falling into the trap of looking at somebody else and saying, well, it’s easy for them to say because, know, because you don’t know what went behind developing a life that supported that decision. And and we shouldn’t let ourselves off the hook. I know that it would be too all too easy for me to say that I live 45 minutes from everything and I just need to go in and get a grocery delivery or something. I could say that, but.
I really want to push against that and make decisions that are quite intentional, which is something I learn from you and Rob all the time. Yeah.
Alison Kay (01:00:03.841)
That’s the word intentional. Yeah, that is the word intentional. And they may not produce the results that you’re intending straight away. They might not even produce the results for years and years and years. Yeah, absolutely.
Andrea (01:00:14.488)
It can take, I think it takes years. takes years. People certainly asked us in that fantastic episode where we answered all the questions, the grill me like a cheese sandwich one. And people certainly asked how long did it take? And you know, when I tried to think about how long it took to get, I’m not where I want to be yet. I’m not even, not even there. But as far as I’ve gotten now, it’s taken me 15 years. You know, I didn’t, I wasn’t able to do all of this overnight. So.
you know, be patient and impatient at the same time. Yeah.
Alison Kay (01:00:44.029)
a lot but every small step helps. That’s it. Every small step helps. It might seem like a small step but it’s a step and those just build up over time. That’s it. Yeah, that’s nice. That’s something I would aspire to the patients bit particularly. Okay, so we talked about kind of vocal. Let’s talk about online a bit.
Andrea (01:00:53.858)
Right. Urgent, but patient. How’s that, Allison?
Andrea (01:01:04.43)
Yeah, right, right.
Alison Kay (01:01:10.153)
Now obviously you can search for farmers online. In some countries that’s easier to do than others. In Italy it’s a nightmare, you can’t find them. But in the UK it’s a lot easier. How do you go about it in the States? Andrea, how do you go about it in the States?
Andrea (01:01:16.174)
Yeah
You have great options in the UK. If you want to find farmers, you can go to eat wild dot com. And I popped that in the show notes so you don’t have to stop folding laundry and write that down. I found farmers there every single time we’ve moved and I only have to find one farm. I’ve only I only ever find one farm on there and that farm leads me to all the other ones in the area. Also, real milk dot com for the US for finding raw milk.
Alison Kay (01:01:27.693)
Thank
Alison Kay (01:01:44.663)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (01:01:47.258)
farm suppliers. They’re not all on there, but there’s a lot on there. And if you contacted one and they didn’t have room for you as a customer, they might know somebody else who’s available or put you on the list. and then there are, good companies that sell their food online because there is just a fact, as you alluded to that sometimes you’re in a place where there might not be a market physically in your area. And there are,
Alison Kay (01:01:56.44)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alison Kay (01:02:14.363)
Yeah.
Andrea (01:02:16.538)
good farms that sell that food online and it will be shipped to you, know, frozen meat and things like that. And if that’s, if that’s the route you need to go, that’s the route you need to go, but you can find those farmers online too.
Alison Kay (01:02:22.022)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Kay (01:02:28.036)
Yeah, when we moved back to the UK after seeing the meat in the supermarket, was like, within like two days, I was like, not buying meat there. And so for a while, for a while we used an organic box thing to get meat whilst we were living with Rob’s mum. So, yeah. Yeah.
Andrea (01:02:38.832)
that’s the scariest.
Andrea (01:02:46.128)
Mmm. That’s right. You do have some good options for that in UK. You’ve got Piper’s Farm. You’ve got that other guy that I can’t remember that does the vegetables. Yeah, Riverford. I was like, it’s not Riverside. That’s what we’re in right now.
Alison Kay (01:02:56.454)
There’s a, yeah, Riverford guy, Watson at Riverford, yeah. No, I know, Riverside, Riverford. You don’t know how many times a day I get that one. Riverside is our recording platform. And so I always say, I’m gonna go and call Andrea on Riverford. Oh no, that’s the wrong one. So when we buy online, do remember to buy in bulk. You know, this helps with your time pressure because you’re not.
Andrea (01:03:09.392)
Mmm.
I wish.
Alison Kay (01:03:23.049)
having to go in and do the orders so often. Nicole said that was really important for her. Exactly, fewer transactions. And it also helps with cost. You can club together with someone, you know, and save more postage and then go and deliver the grains to them, have a nice chat when you do so, when they arrive. I do that for all my grains. We buy in bulk. We just had 15 kilograms of rye, rye from Gilchester’s.
Andrea (01:03:25.796)
Just reduce your transactions. Just think, reduce transactions.
Andrea (01:03:33.626)
big time.
Andrea (01:03:45.444)
Huh.
Alison Kay (01:03:49.832)
And it just saves so much time. If it’s fresh, you can buy in bulk and then preserve it. So just because it’s, you know, the glut season doesn’t mean you can’t buy in bulk. Also online stores. mean, for for farmers, you can search online, but for store staples, there are online stores which you can go to, which leads me to, yeah.
Andrea (01:04:13.082)
What do you mean, like honey or something? Okay.
Alison Kay (01:04:15.486)
Yeah, like honey or olive oil or nuts or, you know, that kind of thing. So not grains, but not meat.
Andrea (01:04:19.151)
Uh-huh.
Right. Where do you, what do you, what’s, can you give me an example of like an online store?
Alison Kay (01:04:27.464)
Yeah. So obviously it’s going to be a UK one. But Hobmadod’s are a online store that I don’t think they have, obviously they have a premises, but I don’t know if you can go there and buy things. They do all of their selling online. So they sell UK grains and pulses and seeds. So we, for example, buy linseed, flaxseed for you, in bulk from Hobmadod’s quite regularly. And we buy some grains from them too. So that’s what I mean by online stores.
Andrea (01:04:32.72)
Okay.
Alison Kay (01:04:57.847)
Hannah asked us about the online stores and I wanted to ask you, how do you know if what you’re buying online is ethical? So I know that you buy a lot from Azure and you know and trust them. It is absolutely immensely. And I know that I’ve since been back in the UK, buy a lot from Hobmadots and both of those sites clearly state what they’re about and are proud of the fact that they’re ethical and they’re supporting.
Andrea (01:05:06.01)
gosh.
Andrea (01:05:09.893)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (01:05:27.076)
decent agriculture and caring for the staff and doing good things in the world. So sometimes they’re clear, you know, like Azure might be or Hobnodots might be, or a site that someone told me about recently, which we’re hoping to use, which is crowd farming, where stuff is shipped by boat from individual farmers, rather than coming through kind of a middleman. So those you kind of know,
Andrea (01:05:43.61)
Wow.
Andrea (01:05:53.52)
Okay.
Alison Kay (01:05:56.46)
Do you use other online stores Andrea and if so how do you judge whether what you’re buying online is ethical?
Andrea (01:06:05.61)
okay. So Azure and Young Living are two places that we get something from pretty much every month. And with Young Living, I went and actually met with their owner, their president and their CEO.
Alison Kay (01:06:12.474)
Mm.
Andrea (01:06:24.864)
And I’ve spent a lot of time on their actual farms because I wanted to get to know the business because of this whole thing. Like you said, online stuff, it’s kind of easy to hide what’s going on. And I wanted to know, and I’ve been in their warehouse and I’ve sat and talked with their customer service reps. And so I feel very comfortable with them and with what drives them to do business and Azure. I haven’t spent as much time talking to people like the owners, although
Alison Kay (01:06:33.461)
Mm, yeah.
Andrea (01:06:53.036)
I do think I would like to interview him. They did ask me if I’d interview him on here and, but we’ve been customers of them. Like I said, since I was, you know, very young, maybe 12 years old. So I feel familiar with them and all the employees I’ve talked to have said such good things about working for the company. So, who else do I buy from?
Alison Kay (01:06:55.802)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (01:07:19.586)
Well, Leah was telling me about a company called Fat Works, she buys she lives on an island in Alaska and the options for food are really limited. So she she can basically get periodic orders from Azure. It’s delivered on a barge and they raise a lot of our hunt and fish. They don’t raise their meat, but they butcher it.
Alison Kay (01:07:23.604)
Okay.
Alison Kay (01:07:31.698)
Yeah.
Andrea (01:07:49.416)
And she said she gets her fat from fat works because she there’s nobody around her that she could get lard from. And Azure doesn’t sell that. So she gets gallon buckets. And she said, you know, when you we went we were on the website yesterday calculating I was making the notes for that episode I told you about. And it’s actually quite economical. Once you buy the bulk size.
Alison Kay (01:07:52.879)
Okay.
Okay.
Alison Kay (01:08:08.18)
Mm-hmm.
Andrea (01:08:16.632)
So I’d say I’d throw fat works on the list of websites for the US.
Alison Kay (01:08:19.752)
So how do you know that that company is aligned with what you believe in?
Andrea (01:08:24.436)
how do I know if they’re a good one? Right. well, that one, don’t actually know. I just going off of her recommendation, but I would say generally speaking, I have called companies and asked, I suppose they could tell you whatever they wanted, but, there’s some things that people say, like when you talk to the Tesco’s person, they might say, we don’t
Alison Kay (01:08:29.394)
Okay. Okay.
Andrea (01:08:51.78)
we have to sell the cheapest thing. don’t have a choice. Or they might say, well, I know our product is more expensive, but you know what’s important to us? Yeah. And you’re like, I’m listening for that. You know, so.
Alison Kay (01:09:03.777)
Yeah, I think that also often online, I will look for where the food is grown. So for example, there’s there’s a supply here in the UK called Buy Whole Foods Online, where you can get a lot of stuff, a lot of grains and a lot of other things like those store cupboard things that I was talking about. But it’s interesting to look and see, okay, where was this grain actually grown? Where does, where does this nut come from? Because they’ll list that on their website. And then you compare that.
Andrea (01:09:11.247)
Yeah.
Andrea (01:09:26.576)
yeah.
Andrea (01:09:31.983)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (01:09:33.099)
to, for example, Hobmadods, who are more expensive than buy Whole Foods online, but virtually everything. think the only thing they sell is Brazil nuts, but doesn’t come from the UK. And they’re pioneering, supporting farmers to grow new crops and different crops through the work that they’re doing. And so, sometimes we have to compromise and maybe the only place I can get something that we’re still using as a staple is not from
Andrea (01:09:46.01)
that makes sense.
Andrea (01:09:50.191)
Yeah.
Alison Kay (01:10:02.283)
the UK. But you can go on the sites and yeah, exactly, mill it. You can go on the sites and you can see, know, where does it come from? You can read the mission of the company. And you can, like you said, you can phone the company as well.
Andrea (01:10:05.201)
Millet
Andrea (01:10:14.565)
That’s
Yeah, that that is something with Azure and Young Living that I looked for specifically every product you can look and see where it came from and where it was grown. And that was one of the choices that helped me decide on Young Living as a company, because out of I think maybe 30 different oil companies that we’ve talked to, they’re the only one that could actually tell you where each plant was grown because everybody else was buying their
Alison Kay (01:10:25.541)
Yeah, okay, yeah.
Andrea (01:10:46.852)
you know, leaves and things through brokers. So it could be from a variety of places. And then what Azure does is each product on their website, you can read where it is, where it’s grown, how it’s grown and you know, who the specific producer was because Azure doesn’t produce all their products. They mostly just distribute. And I have a number of friends who have said, yeah, I had a question about such and so product. So I just
Alison Kay (01:10:49.125)
Yep, so I didn’t know.
Alison Kay (01:11:06.383)
Okay.
Andrea (01:11:16.176)
called Montana Milling, you know, instead of Azure, they called the company that produced it and asked them, you know, hey, do you spray this in the fields or whatever their questions were. that’s, it’s helpful because if you go to like Tesco’s or Walmart, you’ll see a box with a package and it doesn’t really say where it came from because it could have been one of 50, you know, grain field.
Alison Kay (01:11:19.175)
Okay, I see.
Alison Kay (01:11:25.359)
Yeah. Okay.
Alison Kay (01:11:32.431)
You have no idea.
Andrea (01:11:42.712)
growers in the US and who knows which one it was. There’s no way to know exactly where it came from. yeah. yeah. Like a rustic font so that you think you’re living in the 1800s or something.
Alison Kay (01:11:48.684)
But it’ll probably have a cute picture of some tiny little tractor and some things on grass growing. So it looks like it comes from a small farm. It’s called something, exactly something farm series, you know. Anyway, that’s another whole episode about farm washing, isn’t it really? farm washing. So, yes. So we talked about Azure.
Andrea (01:12:03.408)
Jeez.
watching my gosh i have not heard that term
Alison Kay (01:12:16.106)
I talked about Hobmadod’s in the UK, crowd farming, certainly you can use in the UK if you want to get things like olive oil they sell and it comes directly from the producer. Kelly, a supporter told me about Thrive Market, I’ve not used them but she does. My grains are coming a lot from Gilchester’s in the UK, Sumer is a company that’s quite, has buying groups in the UK. And then Amelia told us about Ethical Superstore, which I think is a bit wider.
but those are companies that we know of or we’ve used. So that’s the kind of online. Thank you. Thank you. There’s another question I’ve got for you, which is, if you’re doing it in real life with real people, not online, how do you approach a farmer regarding animals? You talked a little bit about, you know, asking,
Andrea (01:12:45.486)
Andrea (01:12:50.256)
Okay, I’m putting all that in the show notes. Cause then people can review it.
Alison Kay (01:13:11.292)
Are you growing this yourself or, but what about animals and you want to know what, what a farmer feeds his animals or how he farms? How would you approach that? Because I know a lot of people who are listening are just, I find it difficult, difficult to just go up to a farmer and say, excuse me, how do you feed your animals? I don’t know if I want to buy from you. Yeah. How, how would you approach that Andrea?
Andrea (01:13:30.416)
Pardon me.
Andrea (01:13:38.32)
Well, there, is a way to ask that doesn’t sound really aggressive or judgmental. Like you’re a city person who just reads blogs and doesn’t actually know anything about what’s going on. So you could say to a farmer, Hey, I am very interested. And if you’re looking at their website, which a lot of farms have websites, they don’t all, then you’ll get some good clues there. So I’m interested in supporting regenerative agriculture that is kind to the farmer and to the animal and to the land. This is
Alison Kay (01:13:54.521)
Yeah, good start.
Andrea (01:14:07.066)
you know, something that’s become very important to me and it’s why I’m talking to you and I’m not standing at Costco looking at the meat aisle. I am also a realist and I know we don’t live in a perfect world and it takes time to get these systems in place. So I was wondering if you could tell me, educate me about how you raise your animals and what you look for in a customer. And he might say, you know, we really just want the customers who want one-off cuts or he might say,
our preferred customer would come and buy a case of chickens or whatever. And be respectful of the farmer’s time and do study and search any internet pages. have Facebook, Instagram websites before you come in and start ask, just try to learn as much as you can on your own before you get there. And I mean, honestly, one of the best clues is if you can find another customer and ask them and
Alison Kay (01:14:59.781)
Yeah.
Andrea (01:15:01.368)
Occasionally there are these social farmers who are, you know, total introverts and they can spend way too much time educating you and, it’s, it can be satisfying with the farmer and educational for you, but he didn’t get anything done. So, do, do keep that in mind and, and also know your, yeah, no, no, no, what you’re willing. Like I would rather eat.
Alison Kay (01:15:22.399)
Yeah, that’s helpful.
Andrea (01:15:30.532)
Pastured chicken that was fed soy then a factory farmed bird that never went outside but was given a soy free diet. So know what your kind of allowances and tolerances are.
Alison Kay (01:15:37.854)
Yeah, yeah.
Alison Kay (01:15:45.683)
Yeah, that’s really good. Get clear before you start the conversation. You know, go into the new market that I’ve been, you know, learning, you know, we had Flavio in Italy and we talked to him and been to his farm and, know, he built up that relationship and, and now we don’t. And so I’m starting to meet, you know, new suppliers and I think turning up at the same place week after week after week. So they get to know you is a good start because, know, they don’t know whether certainly in Australia, whether you’re just someone who’s
Andrea (01:15:58.692)
We love you, Flavio.
Alison Kay (01:16:15.561)
come to a market once every six months to get something. But if you turn up every single week and buy something every single week, then slowly they’re going to remember your face and they’re going to know who you are. So it’s going to be a sort of a barrier already gone. And then from there, slowly I’ve been able to work things into conversations. do, like you said, be respectful of their time. I do try to…
Andrea (01:16:18.256)
Okay, touristy.
Alison Kay (01:16:44.452)
be aware of who’s around me. So there’s a massive queue or like four people behind me. I’m not going to start talking to the farmer about how often his animals are outside or whether they’re outside every winter or where they are. So I would try to choose my time, you know, see, right, there’s no one at that stall now. I’ll go over now and talk. And then it’s for me, rather than just kind of asking loads of questions at the beginning, it’s slowly getting to know them and sharing what I’ve been doing with their meat and how good it was.
Andrea (01:16:48.342)
Hahaha
Andrea (01:16:52.208)
through.
Alison Kay (01:17:13.795)
This market we’re going to now, there are several meat farmers and to start with, we were going to one particular one and then there was another guy in the corner and he hasn’t got all the signs and I didn’t really know who he was. But then we went over there and had a chat with him and he’s certified organic and we’ve talked about certification and how it’s so expensive to get. But I kind of felt at the beginning stages that, okay, this guy’s certified organic, this other one isn’t.
Okay, let’s try some of his meat and see. And slowly we’re building a relationship with him where I’m just learning a little bit more about his farm and his family every time we go. I had a sort of opposite example with eggs. There’s a stall there that sells eggs and I bought some eggs and then I asked the lady, I said, Oh, how many chickens have you got? And she said, 6,000.
Andrea (01:17:46.276)
huh.
Andrea (01:17:56.816)
Okay.
Alison Kay (01:18:12.426)
At which point I was like, oh, and she was a bit defensive when she said 6,000 and she obviously didn’t want me, it felt like she didn’t want me to ask that. Anyway, I didn’t buy eggs there afterwards because I just, I was in a bit of shock. I don’t particularly want to buy eggs from someone who’s got 6,000 chickens. So we’ve then been asking other farmers and other vegetable growers, oh, have you got chickens who’ve got stalls there? You know, because they might not have them on the counter. Have you got chickens?
Andrea (01:18:12.944)
You
Alison Kay (01:18:39.483)
and do you sell those eggs to try and find smaller people who’ve got like incidental chickens rather than 6,000 chickens. But it takes time for sure to do that. Okay, we’re coming towards the end of this epic episode. A very important point that I want to stress. Do have less, know, do question what you’re buying and question whether you need things.
Andrea (01:18:49.242)
Yep.
Andrea (01:18:55.984)
Haha
Alison Kay (01:19:08.477)
But don’t kill yourself over this. You we all want to be better, but if we push ourselves to be better beyond our sanity, that’s not a good thing. This is a journey. We can invariably cope with less. In fact, as we’ve talked about with choices, it often makes our life simpler. I know when I was on Gaps, my life was simpler because I had a a few choices. But we don’t want to make ourself miserable. This isn’t a competition.
where restricting makes us holier. think about some little strategies that might help for you. So for example, I try to run out of things and then see what happens. Am I okay if they run out? I don’t need to go onto the store and buy that. Or say, okay, I really like these three things regularly that are a bit of a luxury for me. So I’ll buy those, but I won’t buy all the other stuff.
Andrea (01:19:47.896)
Mm-hmm. it’s on purpose.
Alison Kay (01:20:06.381)
that I perhaps might get in a supermarket that will keep me going, you know? So I really like cream and I can get that from the market. So I’ll have that every week because it feels like a luxury and then I won’t feel so bad about something else that I can get from somewhere else. Or, you know, even if those luxuries have to come from a supermarket because that’s going to keep you sane, that can help you work on some of your staple foods, you know, quit the rest.
Andrea (01:20:19.535)
Right.
Andrea (01:20:31.044)
Yep. Yeah. Don’t don’t tie yourself into some kind of an emotional and spiritual knot for for the sake of no, it’ll in fact, it’ll backfire. The guarantee it will backfire and you’ll end up whiplashing and going back into, you know, it’ll be even harder to.
Alison Kay (01:20:38.23)
Yes. Because that doesn’t help anyone.
Alison Kay (01:20:43.894)
Yeah, absolutely.
Alison Kay (01:20:50.196)
It’s like, it’s like we’re losing weight, you know, you ever think, okay, when, when we were younger, let’s just have 800 calories a day. And then two weeks later, you’ve got the tub of ice cream in front of you because you can’t do changes like that. So yeah, be kind to yourself in the journey.
Andrea (01:20:55.054)
Yeah.
Andrea (01:20:58.49)
You
Andrea (01:21:03.113)
there you go. That’s true.
Andrea (01:21:10.958)
And be kind to other people who are at different places in the journey. know, somebody you might look at Allison and and want to judge her because she’s farther down the road where you want to be. Or you might look at somebody who has zero awareness of the supermarket problem and you might want to judge them. But you don’t get to you just don’t get to you have to tend your own garden and be a light, be a light of the joy.
and the excitement of leaving the supermarket economy and make it attractive and interesting. Yeah.
Alison Kay (01:21:43.421)
think that’s the same for family. So if your family aren’t really on board as much as you are, be kind to them and try to be a light and try to use spare time that you might have to do something that will please them with something that you’re happy with buying.
Andrea (01:22:02.416)
Right. Your restriction could make you less holier if you used it as emotional.
Alison Kay (01:22:07.889)
Yeah.
Andrea (01:22:14.08)
firepower to aim at people so do need to be a little aware of that.
Alison Kay (01:22:16.956)
Mm.
So you said at the top of this episode that our first quitting supermarkets episode was number nine. So do go back and listen to that. If you want support and want people around you who believe in the same things that you do, come and join us as a Patreon. Come to Ancestral Kitchen podcast, forward slash join. And Hannah, is, who’s been a supporter for a long time, who’s on discord, shared something with me about supermarkets really coincidentally, like
three days before we recorded this episode and I wanted to read it to kind of close the episode. She said, Hey, Alison, I just wanted to share with you some news. I was going through our finances for 2024 and found that we went from spending 78 % of our food dollars, euros, at the grocery stores down to 40 % in 2024. If you count what we are spending on chicken feed in that, then the grocery store proportion will be even lower.
Andrea (01:22:50.357)
Thank you, Hannah.
Andrea (01:23:11.609)
Whoa!
Alison Kay (01:23:17.895)
I re-listened to the quitting supermarkets episode to see how we could do even better in 2025. We’ve sort of knocked out all the easy stuff in 2024, proper planning, so we get veg and meat from the farmers, grain from a mill. Now it’s the trickiest stuff, like breaking my family’s need for tropical fruit and getting our dairy situation sorted out. I want us to eat more beans and legumes this year too. I just wanted to share in numbers what an impact you’ve had on our family.
and we’ve infected friends and family around us too, so the contagion is spreading. Isn’t that nice to hear?
Andrea (01:23:49.392)
You
Andrea (01:23:54.756)
That’s amazing to see the numbers.
Alison Kay (01:23:57.812)
Yeah, that’s a big drop, isn’t it?
Andrea (01:23:59.672)
makes me want to go in and maybe I can find pull out our tax documents from six years ago or something and compare them.
Alison Kay (01:24:02.122)
do some calculator things.
Alison Kay (01:24:10.344)
Yeah, it’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that with us, Hannah. Okay, so we still want to talk about Amazon. We have so many things to say about Amazon and buying other things other than food, like clothes and electrical stuff. So we’re going to head over to the private podcast feed now. Come and join us if you want to. I will say goodbye to you here for the moment, Andrea. Thank you very much.