There are probably a variety of ways to tackle (accept) life overseas. You can choose to fully embrace the local culture by only shopping for and eating things that are locally available. Alternatively, you can import (via Amazon or a variety of other sources) just about anything you could need or want from the US. We have found that we fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.
One of the things I have come to appreciate while living here are the locally available fruits and vegetables. You become much more attuned to the growing seasons. Strawberries are available for a matter of weeks each year. Zucchini is available a bit more often, but still has a definite growing season. Mangoes, starfruit, grapes, and lychees are some of my kids' favorites, but also have a very limited season. Who knew I'd become extremely proficient at cleaning and preparing starfruit? I'm still not that great with the mangoes... Lychees are my newest favorite (as they're in season right now). Admittedly though they make my fingers hurt. All that peeling... At least they taste incredibly good once you get them peeled.
Bananas are pretty much always in seasons, but the particular variety you get just depends on the day. Some days we end up with the mini-bananas and some days the standard sized ones. They're all good in my opinion. To my knowledge, all of the apples we get here are imported, but they're available year round. Carrots, cucumbers, onions, and potatoes are also common at all times of the year. Meal planning, to the extent that we try to incorporate the locally available produce, depends on keeping track of what's currently in the store.
School lunches are another ball of wax altogether. The school offers a prepared lunch each day (for a set fee), but we have opted not to take advantage of that. We gave B an option, and he said he prefers to bring his own lunch. There's a new bakery near our house that we have just started using for sandwich bread, but white bread is available at most grocery stores. Wheat bread is much less common, and is generally not available in sandwich sized portions.
When preparing to come here, one of the most common things I heard from other FAO families was that snack foods were generally difficult to come by, and expensive to boot. They didn't lie. That's one of the things we order online and have shipped here. We order pretzel barrels, Cheez-it's, and other snack items from Costco in bulk on fairly regular intervals so we have small finger foods to put in lunches. Sadly things like Veggie-straws (a favorite of the kids) are not carried on their websites. If you're thinking about keeping your Costco membership while overseas, keep two things in mind: 1) A lot of things from their warehouse are not online 2) They do not ship to DPO. All of our Costco items have to come through the pouch (which does limit what we can order).
Lack of local breakfast foods was also mentioned as an issue before we came overseas. Under normal circumstances, our embassy commissary maintains a good selection of cereals at not-exorbitant prices. Unfortunately, with the ordering issues we've had recently (which we hope to be resolved within the next month), we've been short on cereal. I used amazon for a while to try to supplement, but I have discovered that walmart.com has better prices on their cereal. The downside is that you can only order 4 boxes of each type of cereal per order (yes, I like to buy everything in large quantities) and while they claim to ship to DPO, I have had several instances where they put all of my items in boxes much too large to fit in the DPO mailbag and they got returned to Walmart. I got a refund, no questions asked, but I still didn't get my stuff... So, for breakfast foods, I recommend Walmart, and I also recommend just paying the shipping on whatever you want rather than trying to stock up enough to get free shipping ($50 and over per order).
For those who do a lot of baking, I've heard great things about King Arthur Flour. Several times a year, they offer free shipping (or you can purchase a yearly membership and get free shipping all the time). They don't just have flour by the way. They stock a wide variety of baking mixes, storage containers, and accoutrements.
So, share! What are you favorite online spots for food?
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