Broccoli here runs about $20 ECD ($7.38 USD) a pound. Peppers, about $25 ECD ($9.23 USD). If you have just landed and you are reading that thinking it must be a typo, it is not, and welcome.
Nobody grew that price. It got shipped in.
What you are actually buying
A vegetable that arrives on a boat carries the boat with it. Fuel, refrigeration, port handling, customs, the wholesaler, the shop. By the time it reaches you, most of what you are paying for is the journey, not the thing.
And the journey is not stable. The Grenadines run on imports, and import disruption is a quarterly event around here, not a crisis. Hurricanes. Port strikes. Customs delays. Regional shipping consolidation that happens in a boardroom somewhere and shows up in your basket four weeks later.
Which produces the part that nobody warns you about: I cannot walk into the same supermarket two weeks running, with the same list and the same money, and expect to come out with the same shopping. Not sometimes. Routinely.
Why this makes cooking here expensive in a way that isn't about prices
If you plan a week of meals around specific ingredients, and a third of them aren't there, you have not saved money by planning. You have bought some things you now have to use up and you are still going to the shop again.
That is the real cost of eating here, and it is not on any receipt. It is the second trip. It is the thing you bought because the thing you wanted was gone. It is the pack of something that went off in the fridge because the plan it belonged to fell apart on Tuesday.
What actually helps
Cook to what is in season and in the ground here, not to a recipe you saw. Local is the only supply line that does not have a boat in it.
Build meals that survive a missing ingredient. If your dinner collapses because there is no red pepper, it was too specific. A curry does not care. A braise does not care.
Buy the expensive things for the meals where you will actually taste them, and stop buying them for the meals where they disappear.
And when you look at what a week of real food costs you here — the shopping, the second trip, the waste, the time — do the sum honestly before you decide what is expensive. Most people have never actually done it. It is usually not the number they expected.
