Leeneia, I agree that much of the health foods and organics market is focused at selling pricey premium products to the affluent. It's really quite sad that the marketing people got their paws into the wholefood sector.

Wasn't always the case of course, I can still recall being taken by my Da to a bulk wholefoods supplier. Everything (nuts, seeds, rice, beans, lentils, spices, herbs) was stocked in huge tubs and measured out into weighing scales before being simply packaged in brown paper bags.

Sadly the days of wholefood shops like that are more or less gone and in their stead we have fancy shmancy places full of expensive supplements, though there is a stall on our local market where you can buy wholefoods (including organics) at affordable prices.

Nowadays I shop online, and I can get bulk bags of organic wholefoods at lower cost than the non-organic kind. Still, you do have to actually want to eat the way I do and eat stuff like brown rice, beans and lentils as staples most days, in order to benefit from the lower prices that buying in bulk provides.

As for vegetables, I never buy organic - organic really does push up the price of veg. So we've started dabbling in growing our own this summer. Though the garden is pretty (meaning very!) messy right now, we've grown broad beans, onions, spring onions, runner beans, yellow dwarf beans, lettuce, pumpkins (huge), spinach (lots), rainbow chard, bok choi, beetroot (still immature), radishes, numerous herbs. Peppers, tomatoes and courgettes have all suffered from crappy UK Summer. But overall, we're quite pleased. Next year we'll try being more organised! And it's poop all the way from now on too.