Real Food at Walmart – A Quick Tour

Two weeks ago in my post Real Food at Walmart – Can it be done I posed the question: What if you had to buy all your food at Walmart? Pretend you didn’t have access to any local food or health food stores at all … how close could you get to a 100% “Real Food” diet under those circumstances?

This week I took a little tour of my local Walmart very early in the morning when I could have the food aisles mostly to myself . With my camera in hand I took a bunch of pictures of what I found that would qualify as real food. I used the question “Would Grandma recognize this as real food?” as my primary guiding question. Next, I considered whether Sally Fallon would consider it a real or compromise food. I left out anything I felt she would view as a “must avoid” item, though I’m including some items that are newfangled on her list in Nourishing Traditions like pasteurized dairy and some sugars.I’ll make note of any newfangled industrial foods so that you can make an extra effort to eliminate them first when the opportunity arises. It’s important to keep in mind while making dietary choices that involve compromise that there are consequences for every compromise. So we want to continually work toward improvement without stressing ourselves out!

I’m hoping we can have a lively discussion this week on the items shown, and in the coming weeks I will revisit the store section by section and we can talk about each category in detail. Hopefully with everyone’s input we can further expand the choices!

Lots of pictures in this post! The captions tell the tale . I think we’ll start with what is most easily located and work our way down to the difficult to find.

What’s easy to find at Walmart

Package after package displays a simple ingredient list like this one.

Grains are pretty easy to find if you are looking for the standard issue whole wheat flours, oats and rice.

Beans are easy to find, though there isn’t as wide a variety as can be found elsewhere.

Lots of legumes …

Pretty good versions of kids favorites PB & J can be had.

What’s not as difficult to find as you might imagine

In a word, organics! There are quite a few organic labels to be seen at Walmart, though not nearly enough. Organic produce, even in Austin where the local Walmart is to some degree competing with the organic mecca grocery stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts, HEB Central Market little can be found in the way of fresh organic produce. I was more successful finding processed products that were labeled organic.

Saw quite a bit of the Newman’s Own label too …

Somewhat difficult to find wholesome version of

Good fats seems to be the hardest thing to find in a Walmart! Since it’s the single most important improvement you can make to your diet I plan to make a very exhaustive survey of everything available.

Butter choices are limited but they are there …

Largish olive oil section, approach with caution … much of the olive oil on the market isn’t really olive oil at all.

Lots of meat available though it looks like virtually all of it is CAFO beef and factory farmed chicken and pork.

Organ meats can be found …

Found a section with some unusual cuts …

Found some dairy items, though everything is pasteurized. Had better luck here than at the health food mecca stores finding dairy that had not been ultra-pasteurized though. Most organic dairy is ultra-pasteurized so those stores tend to stock it heavily.

Ok, so now that we’ve had a tour what comes next?

Next post we’ll start with a particular food group and work our way thru the store winnowing out bad choices and working our way toward the best possible choices in the store, or available thru a special order from Walmart’s website for that particular food group. I will take note of any items for people on special diets like a gluten-free diet. In the meantime tell me what you thought of this tour … did I overlook something? Is there something you’ve found in your store that you could share? What compromises would you make?