The grocery hierarchy

Getting the weekly groceries used to be simple, you'd just buy what you needed and go home. Now we have so many choices available it takes me ages to choose what to buy, so I developed an ad-hoc hierarchy of product traits to measure against:

Organic:
Always buy organic, unless it's really expensive. I've got a budget to stick to.
I see Tesco has started to sell organic veg boxes in the store; pah! You don't know where the veg are coming from, so I'd rather support local delivery services. I haven't subscribed to a service yet, but as we spend about £40 a month on veg anyway, a weekly drop costing £10 would be beneficial.

Local:
Always buy local if possible as this reduces food miles. There's no point buying organic fine beans if they come from Kenya, or Cox's apples - a quintessentially English fruit - from New Zealand. Most supermarkets will show where food comes from: always read the label!

Fairtrade:
But only if the item comes from a developing country. I suspect that fairtrade items from developed countries are a gimmick.

Price:
I don't mind paying a little extra,but some organic / fairtrade / even local items are priced way over my budget. We have to be a bit sensible about it.

Seasonal:
likely to be cheaper and local, though not necessarily organic. The trick is to know what's in season (and I'm no expert).
I wanted to buy strawberries all through the summer months, but they were so expensive I only did this once, and then they were British but not organic; I heard strawberries are VERY pesticide-intensive, so it was quite a guilty pleasure.

Bonuses:
Yeo Valley is organic AND local!
Thatchers cider is made four miles away from me!
I've been informed that tomatoes grown in warm Mediterranean climates are more pesticide-intensive than those grown in polytunnels in the UK, where biological controls are more widely used - but the double bonus of less chems and being locally grown is possibly offset by the fact that polytunnel plastic has to be replaced every five years or so.

Exceptions:
I ALWAYS buy organic root vegetables ever since I learned that the root of a plant is suffused with the soil solution, so any nasty chemicals sprayed on the crop will be right there in the food. If there's no organic choice, I don't buy it.
I suspect that organic mushrooms are a gimmick, but buy them just in case.
Always buy organic kidney / haricot etc. beans, as the non-organic variety are apparently consitently high in residual pesticides.
Never buy cut flowers. It's a chemical-intensive industry, often air-freighted and who wants a handful of corpses anyway? You're better off buying a live plant.
Organic brazil nuts are a fraud! ALL brazil nuts are organic as they have to be harvested from the rainforest. This is a piece of greenwash. Harrumph.

Much of this information was gleaned from the rather good New Green Consumer Guideby Julie Hailes :-)