Pour Some Sugar On Me...

Not really, I just like freaking the kids out with Def Leppard! I am going to complain about sugar prices though... So fruit is starting to come on, and it's canning season, and I ran out of sugar mid-batch. I ran to the local store and a 10 pound sack of sugar was almost $7. Is this another one of those 'sin tax' things no one told me about? (Yes, we have those in WA state, pop and candy are taxed now) I was mad as heck, because frankly one of the most irritating things about living in a small town is the prices at the local grocery store being soooo much higher than they are down in the city. I usually take 2 big shopping trips a month, then buy small things or impulse items locally to try and budget my money. With 2 kids and their friends, our grocery bill can easily become astronomical, and my layoff a year ago makes getting by tougher and tougher... So when I'm trying to be frugal by putting up my own fruit for winter and I'm hit by a price increase at the market on staples, I get upset (and whiny). We don't buy a lot of premade junk food, I cook from scratch, I watch the sales fliers, I try really hard to plan ahead and my grocery bill is still astronomical. People say 'Use Coupons' and for me that is such a joke, as we don't buy any of that stuff. Especially since my food allergies condition became significantly worse.

Anyway, back to sugar: Then I started snooping around online, and lo and behold, there are issues! What issues? Well, apparently in 2009 the price of sugar doubled because the crazy weather the world is having affected the crops. My local store owner probably bought some of his sugar supply while the prices were so high. The fact is that we need to look around and think about why things are happening, instead of just what local thing happened and how mad we are about it.

A lot of times we see international tragedies on the news (or not, depending on whether the national news is still repeating something endlessly and pointlessly, like whether Angelina and Brad had another baby) and we don't think about how we are affected by things happening across the world. We are. The rise in sugar prices caused by crop failures is a small example. We have been encouraged to 'buy locally and think globally'. Oftentimes we stress the first part, but not the second. That thought pattern is obvious in the simple fact that we don't hear of many international happenings unless #1 American citizens are directly affected or #2 we look online at international news. How many times have you watched the news only to see a horrific tragedy wrapped up with the words 'And out of the 140 victims, 3 Americans died'. Like American lives are more valuable....

So I'll stop whining about the price of sugar in favor of thinking about the livelihoods and farms lost in the terrible international floods of the last year. Kind of puts it all in perspective.