Grocery shopping / Emotions, habits, traits of character

My monodiet development:
Fruits separately. Sprouts (wheat seeds and mung beans in germination) separately. Vegetables and root crops both separately and mixed, but already minimizing the number of ingredients per "salad". Dill, parsley, green onion, coriander and similar both separately and cut into "salads". Cucumbers, cauliflower, marrows, sweet paprika on their own. Tomatoes with garlic or with radish, or guacamole (tomatoes with avocado, garlic, lemon juice - could be without lemon juice). Korean style carrots.

Bananas: I guess the majority of bananas nowadays are GMO, and when I learned this I even avoided them for a while. But as for now I still do love them, and it's not good to suppress one's wants for a long time =) So I've been buying and tasting every brand I came across. Now I find tasty only one type of bananas, those with Gold Sun Ecuador sticker. I hope to enjoy a lot bananas somewhere in southern Europe when I'm there in late August (if I'm there...)

Tomatoes: I remember the pleasure I got from tasting Turkish tomatoes in Istanbul after my long Dutch experience. It was a drastic change then. Turkish tomatoes sold in Russia are really bad, and the tests by Roszdravnadzor (a governmental agency for health and all kinds of safety issues) show in many tomatoes a very high residual chemicals level, above the standards (but still they are on the market - it's Russia...). These are actually the only tomatoes reported to contain a high residual level of fertilizers on the market. I doubt it, as there are tomatoes from Spain and Holland which don't smell or taste like tomatoes. We avoid them. The tomatoes that taste good are imported from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, and the prices range from 150 to 250 RUR now (1 EUR~44 RUR) while other tomatoes cost 100-120 RUR a kilo.

Young garlic: just wonderful. Smells nice, contains much more water than late summer garlic. Yes, it's possible to eat several cloves in a monodiet way =) But usually I squeeze it on tomatoes.

Weekend market: summer is coming and the choice is bigger and bigger, and finally there is radish (it's not common to have radish in winter here, only at some supermarkets, looked at as very "artificial"). They all claim on their price-tags it's from Krasnodar (the most southern region of the RF), and I believed them. The second time I came to buy radish I saw some small Israeli packets with radish beyond the counter lying in the same place where the very big packet with what they called Krasnodar radish. They just opened the small packets and put the radish into the big packets from which they eventually took it to weight for the customers. I don't have anything against produce from Israel (I am not very familiar with it, usually it's not bad, their sun gives it all its love). But I try to minimize my chemicals intake =) so my first choice is produce from the countries of the ex-USSR. When I commented my finding to the seller, she just asked me with a sigh if I was taking that or not. I felt offended and went away. A women at a stall nearby was honest with me and said her radish was from Poland. At another stall radish looked different and I was told that that one yes was from Krasnodar.

Changing the character and my reactions: everything is changing automatically, with all I've been reading and watching. But many of my traits of character and reactions need intentional and deliberate efforts to change, and it's hard. By now I have found the most important issues, not through a meditation, but through a systematic deep contemplation, have written them down and realized that I had never seen them so pronounced in me before nor has my mom. I believe learning oneself is the most interesting thing on Earth (the second interesting thing is exploring Nature). The most destructive emotions and habits are as follows: feeling shame (испытывать чувство стыда), censure (осуждение), envy (зависть), pity/compassion (жалеть, жалость). I know that according to the standard modern paradigm it's good to feel compassion and shame. According to many healers it's not as it is self-destruction on the energetic level which passes on to the physical level (physical health, life in the material world), so the way to improve the energetic level is to change the habit from feeling pity etc. to shedding love to everyone. I believe the healers. Their words are in line with Hinduism and Christianity. But although I understand what to do many of my reactions are changing extremely slow.
I have also started to realize what my fears are. An enormous amount of work is ahead. Every time I learn something new about the world and about me I am happy for a while but then realize that there is even more to know. And the world is getting bigger and bigger! A wonderful sensation!