I largely exited the standard food supply about two years ago after my partner developed a number of food allergies including Celiac. It has been altogether a w

I largely exited the standard food supply about two years ago after my partner developed a number of food allergies including Celiac. It has been altogether a wonderful experience. Our mix has been since then around 50% from farmers' markets, 20% bulk goods from an organic grocer, 20% we grow ourselves (or more between June and August), and at most 10% from a high-end butcher. Our expenditures have increased only minimally (from ~10 to 12% of income; we are graduate students so it is relatively high). We now spend less time overall getting food: we spend ~1 hr a week the farmers' market (and see friends at the same time) and ~1 hr a month at the grocery store. The butcher takes about 10 minutes a week. Charcuterie like chicken confit and smoked duck breast keeps for weeks so we can keep a supply in the fridge; between this and the bulk goods we never make extra runs to the grocery store. Some observations on the transition: -Expensive fresh items are easy to grow in small amounts of space (e.g. herbs, berries) -"discrete meat is a treat": we eat steaks, fillets, etc. less frequently and instead use stocks, bake vegetables in animal fats, fry veggie cakes, and the like instead -Charcuterie is amazing: pork and chicken are relatively expensive, and a lot of the French preparations take very little time to prepare to serve -Fruits and vegetables at farmers' markets are only marginally more expensive -Our farmer's markets are a mixture of certified organic and conventional produce. We buy both, what matters more is that it is small-scale. -Growing your own isn't for everyone, and is certainly more expensive than buying it through a store (factoring in opportunity cost for time and land, and you don't get economies of scale). However, I would recommend it as a hobby to pretty much anyone on HN: I spend 8-12 hours a day on a computer, so spending 2-4 hours a week planting things, pruning fruit trees, thinking through drip irrigation systems, and learning about soil ecology is a ton of IRL fun. We are very conscious that our diet is not 'natural' or in some way a reversion to older ways of life. I can get ridiculously cheap drip irrigation equipment on Amazon Prime delivered to my door, many of the vendors at the farmer's market take Stripe, and there's no such thing as a crop failure in mid 21st century coastal California. Our food system is what's next, no what came before.