WNYC’s Crowdsourcing Map

Also on the topic of food shopping, I couldn’t help but share this brilliant project devised by public radio’s The Brian Lehrer Show (is anything they do not brilliant?).

Introduced this month, the “crowdsourcing” project forgoes statistical evidence and cuts right to the vox populi in discerning the costs of basic supermarket items in the New York City. This is a land of diversity in many ways. But prices for a single quart of milk? You’re talking differences of dollars. Alas, this is no surprise to any fellow New Yorker. But now, with the help of their price-hounding maps, we can actually pinpoint the closest market to go to for the cheapest commodity on our shopping list.

Just check out this virtual map of milk prices. You can also click on the lettuce icon or beer bottle icon for crowdsourced results for the prices of a head of iceberg lettuce or a six-pack of Budweiser, respectively. Turns out my favorite grocery store, the Fairway Market in Red Hook, holds a tie for the cheapest quart of milk around. And that Associated Market on 5th Ave. in Park Slope that I used to live nearby has some pretty competitive prices all around.

Though brilliant, my biggest question about this project is, of course: Why couldn’t they have instead sourced for organic milk, romaine lettuce, and at least Yuengling Lager? Come on, people! WNYC listeners have got to be with me on this. Seriously.

Okay. I’m calm now. So, who wants to be part of my mini-crowd and source the cheapest purveyors of these “foodie-friendly” bare essentials?

I think I may already have the answers to two of them. I can only guess that the Fairway in Red Hook also has the most devastatingly awesome (devastating, that is, because I no longer live close enough to it that I can bike there and back with a full load of groceries without collapsing by the time I try to cross Atlantic Ave.) prices for organic milk as they do for regular milk. What might that be exactly, though? (Just to twist the blade in a little bit.)

Romaine lettuce seems easy — they go for a dollar a head at most any Farmers’ Market, notably the stand I picked mine up from today in Union Square. Anyone know of a lower price than that?

And Yuengling: America’s oldest brewery, the pride of Pennsylvania, and my longtime favorite cheap beer. I have always wondered where it’s sold the cheapest. They go for about $6.99/six-pack at the Associated Market on Waverly St. between Lafayette and Dekalb Ave. in Brooklyn, I think. Who’s got a better price?

Let’s pull for a foodie invasion of WNYC’s finely tuned project, here. I hope it happens, too, because I sure don’t know how to mark up a Google map the way they do.

And, uh, happy Halloween. I was going to cook something very scary but then ate so much candy at work, I lost my gut. Har, har.