Many of us shop at Costco and feel varying degrees of guilt about it.  Meats and produce, while of the highest quality available in a supermarket setting and without buying locally come from Australia, New Zealand, Peru and Brazil. As far as carbon footprints go, that seems pretty heavy. There are those who say that it takes less fuel per piece to move an orchards worth of bananas from Brazil to Yonkers than it does to move a local crop of in-season apples from upstate NY to the NYC Washington Square Green market. I hope that’s not just wishful thinking, but I don’t know. Given the opportunity I buy locally, but even in a place as aware as the NYC area, that isn’t easily accomplished for much of the year                
    So what does one do when there’s a Costco ten minutes away? I rationalize, I admit it, because a home cook can do well by the family and food budget at the Costco.
    The Maple Syrup is from Canada. I can’t say that all Maple Syrup is the same, but Kirkland Maple Syrup does a good job as a granola sweetener and I use it for other things, too. The price has gone up from around $14.00 last year to a little over $19.00 today. We will have to get used to Canadian Maple Syrup as the climate warms and the sugar bushes in this country produce less and less.
    The avocados are from Mexico; five or six to a net. This is hard to beat at about $1.00 a piece. Of course they all ripen together demanding either that they be eaten this minute or lost.  The small Portobello mushrooms are from Pennsylvania. Navel oranges come from California and the one I had a few minutes ago was very nice. The Clemintines are still coming from Spain. The dried blueberries are American, but there is no indication where they were grown. Peru and Brazil had sent up fresh berries, but I didn’t get any of those. The pineapple is from Costa Rico – and a fine pineapple it is, too.
    Costco spinach is always ‘baby’ spinach. Cooked with enough butter it isn’t bad, but it is intended, I think, for salads and is not as interesting/tasty as curly leaf spinach which I see hardly anywhere at all these days.  The other salad greens are as fresh as any commercially available greens are today. They are days if not weeks from the farm, but then, fresh lettuces in March are somewhat miraculous in any event. Most of the other vegetables are precut and who needs that?  Juicers can get hold of some truly monumental carrots and there is often a wide variety of sweet and hot peppers. The onion soup tonight will be made from yellow onions grown in Mission, Texas with lamb stock made from the Easter leg of in lieu of beef stock – which I don’t have.
    The leg of lamb bought today traveled here from Australia. Sometimes it comes from New Zealand. The lamb chops are lovely and flavorful.  I would prefer to buy American lamb, but see it only rarely if at all and always at a very premium price. I’d pay for it, but there doesn’t seem to be any of around except by mail order.
    The big beef round tip (a large bowling ball sized chunk weighing 12 pounds) is presumably from America. It doesn’t claim to be from anywhere so it must have been raised out west, fattened in a feedlot and sold to Costco. It is graded  ‘choice’ and I will break it down into the various parts and cut it up for dog food except the unknown – to me anyway – part that resembles a hanger steak. That will be ours, poor dog. This is a more expensive feed than dry dog food, but close to the canned stuff and surely better for the dog.
    All Costco beef is ‘choice’. It isn’t real interesting, but it is as good as supermarket beef is going to get. Still, it’s a factory product and we have, to my dearest’s chagrin, venison instead.
    When the weather is right and the requests start coming for spare ribs, I make a trip to Costco. Spare ribs manage to survive the industrialization of the pig and remain eatable.  I don’t bother with the other parts of the pig at Costco except for the every now and then shoulder which is okay to use for pulled pork and scrapple. I don’t like to buy any pork at Costco, however. It’s all factory meat and I am fond of the pig and don’t like to see them raised this way.
    The same is true of the chicken. The chicken is factorified, mostly tasteless stuff. When I buy it at all I get either the wings or the thighs – the fatty parts. Mostly, chicken’s a pass at Costco.
    The fish can be quite good and in season there is Alaskan Salmon and other wild caught fish.  The year round Salmon is farm raised, though. I think today almost all the fish was from South America. I did see wild caught and boat processed flash frozen wild Chinook salmon in the frozen foods department and I have had good luck with smoked fish. This is either imported from England/Scotland or locally processed.
    I picked up three different cheeses; one American and two French. I tend to keep the Cabot Vermont Cheddar around as a pantry item. It is aged three years and lists the ingredients as Pasteurized Milk, Cheese cultures, Salt, Enzymes. It’s from close by, so that’s nice. The iStara Petit Basque comes from Lacreveau, France and contains full fat pasteurized sheep’s milk, salt, rennet, calcium chloride, starters and caramel surface coloring. The EntreMont Comte’ comes from France and has no English on the package except for the price label which also has an ingredients list: Raw milk, lactic acid, rennet and salt. There are the usual grocery store cheeses available by the ton and in a fairly wide variety.
    Some breads at Costco could probably last out the millennium, but there are several varieties that contain only the requisite, whole-wheat flour, yeast, salt and water.  Some have some nuts and seeds added like Eli’s Health Bread. We buy these. We freeze the Eli’s.
    Kirkland olive oil is certainly serviceable. The butter is okay by me. It’s the only place I know to get large quantities of peanut or canola oil for turkey frying.
    Starbucks dumps huge loads of coffee on Costco. Every so often a not so bad fair trade coffee will be available, but it is sold in quantities too large for most people to use before it stales up entirely. People who love coffee aren’t going to be won over by Costco’s efforts ever.
    The rice is hard to fault. I wonder what the Indians are eating, however, as Costco sells enormous quantities of Basmati, both white and brown.
    One big surprise has been Kirkland Rubs. I make my own usually, but got caught way short last year with a kid’s party and so grabbed a jar of their Steak Rub. Sea Salt, Black Pepper, Dill Seed, Coriander, red pepper, dehydrated garlic, paprika, calcium silicate.  It’s true, I like mine more better, but this stuff worked out nicely.
    There’s always a bag of Kirkland California Pistachios in the pantry. I like Turkish and Greek Pistachios way better, dried on the roof washed with sea water and salt, but, like American Lamb, I am not seeing any lately since many neighborhood nut roasters started disappearing from NY streets.