Fun places to lose yourself in grocery shopping

The most fun place to shop for veggies, is the nearby sunset valley farmers market. http://www.sunsetvalleyfarmersmarket.org/ We *try* to walk there (takes 10 minutes), and start off with one of their strange organic coffees. Then we go on to picking local veggies grown organically. They're not certified organic, but they're local and a good approximation to organic.. It's also a place A practises his addition and subtraction and making change, as he's in charge of making payments and getting change. It's open Saturdays 9 to 1.

The second most fun place to shop is the gourmet grocery store called Central Market. The 70,000-square-foot Central Market Westgate was designed to be reminiscent of a European-style market, with aisle upon aisle of fresh produce, meats, seafood and an incredibly large cheese department. You'll find more than 600 varieties of fresh produce alone. We live 5 minutes away from here (we recently moved out of the suburbs, into a new neighborhood near downtown Austin). Having ruled out public schools, and fallen in love with a private school that goes up to 9th grade (where they cook in class, by the way, watch birds, grow wildflowers and have the most incredibly designed math material imaginable...), we figured we might as well live close to it. This location is amazing. Every kind of store in walking distance - downtown sort of living (7 mins from downtown Austin), and a brand new development with green belt ("forests") in the back. The deer and other wildlife (snakes, scorpions etc) bring back fond memories of growing up in IIT Madras campus (also a forest). http://www.iitm.ac.in/The%20Campus/ (It's a beautiful setting - but clearly someone unimaginative wrote up the description of the campus!! They forgot to mention the deer, forests, snakes, and the occasional tiger!) Minus the tiger sightings, it's a pretty similar setting here! There's a wonderful community feeling here as well, and I got together with another neighbor and organized a neighborhood party to get to know everyone. We also started up a walking group to explore the nearby trails. The entire city only has 400 residents, and pour neighborhood has 35 so far (60 eventually). There aren't many young children A's age in walking distance, but there're plenty about 5 minutes drive away.

The 3rd most fun place to shop for us, is Whole Foods Market. It's designed to be a unique experience - healthy foods galore, amazing customer service ("can you find me eggless 100% whole wheat organic spaghetti made in the U.S " and they get it for you without batting an eyelid).. Since we try and eat 100% whole grains, and stay away from preservatives & colors, and organic produce - this's really quite an amazing place. The only snag is it takes 15 minutes to get there. Spoilt by 5 minutes to any place, 15 is really a bit too much. We have to go there once a week to buy organic walnuts and dried cranberries (that we try to eat everyday). There's so much more to explore here...http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/lamar/
There's a good reason it's called "Whole paycheck" though. Particularly now that gas is so expensive and they ship everything from Calfornia.

Sun Harvest is a great alternative to Whole Foods. So is Wheatsville co-op. At Sun Harvest, it's fun to talk to the people who actually moved things into bins. Whole foods is an army - people working at 2 ends of the store have never met.