Food Club And Never Running Our Of Peanut Butter

I don't remember our family going to the grocery store much when I was a kid. I guess that's because we had Food Club.

What's Food Club you ask?

Well, basically Food Club was a small group of my parent's friends who would get together every so often to order hard-to-get organic groceries and dry-goods at a discount.

That's right, many years before there was a Wal-Mart in our neck of the woods, my parents and their friends were buying 5-gallon buckets of peanut butter, slats of yogurt, and 10 lb. bricks of cheese. Naturally, it was ALL natural.

Here is how Food Club worked. Someone, (I'm not quite sure who, because the process never seemed that structured), would organize and host a Food Club approximately every month. At the meeting, each family would submit their wish list of groceries. A certain amount of bartering and shuffeling would occur, so everyone could get the types of food and quantities they wanted. Then, as a group, Food Club would place one massive order for the next month's delivery.

The second part of the meeting was the fun part. The food from the previous order was divvied up and taken home. I remember a good vibe at home on Food Club day. The house always seemed to warm up when we were flush with food. And the first few days were great because my two bros and I didn't have to ration our stashes as much. You see, each of us boys would get a certain number of Sasporilla Sodas, or Bags of Bandito Corn Chips, or Carob Bars to last us until the next Food Club gathering.

By the end of the month though, pickings were slim. I remember eating lots of grilled cheese sandwiches, and lots of things made from pinto beans.

And no matter how hard we tried, we never ever ran out of Peanut Butter...