groceries Archives

As I stood in front of a shelf full of unfamiliar jars of pasta sauce, I thought to myself, “What have you done?”

That the store we chose was named “New World” was not lost on me, because even after 24 hours of travel I can detect thematic content that has the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

People have been asking me, “So, New Zealand – are you excited?” for a couple of months now. It’s gotten to the point where my answers have become rote, though still entirely genuine. I talk about weather, schools, wind, and driving on the wrong side of the road.

After all, Wellington wasn’t going to be so different from Philadelphia. It was another major city with cars and people and houses. I kept that comforting thought fixed in my mind. Even as we traipsed through airports, customs, and wrestling our rental car, the pure weight of our move hadn’t really struck me.

Not like it did in the grocery store.

In that moment standing in front of the pasta sauce, I like to think that I was transmitting a very specific, very serious distress signal that Douglas Adams described so well in the first chapter of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse.

In fact, I am a mere eight thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-two miles from my birthplace. Maybe that’s why no one caught on to my signal. As distressing as it was to me, it was far too minute for anyone else to notice. [Read more…] about ripping off the culture shock band-aid (of groceries)

I’ve been thinking about groceries, scale, and the American way.

Last night, while our daughters napped under J’s watch, Lindsay and I absconded to Wegmans for a quick shopping trip slash Pokémon catching session. Yes, you read that right – we had an hour to ourselves and we went grocery shopping for amusement. To be fair, Wegmans is definitely like an amusement park for hungry adults recovering from five hours swimming in a lake with two boisterous young ladies.

Photo by Flickr User Seuss. Some rights reserved.

You could fit an entire French supermarket into this Wegman’s photo. Photo by Flickr User Seuss. 2008, some rights reserved.

I know I’m a little late to coming around to Wegmans – heck, Lindsay grew up shopping at one! Even as I marveled at how Wegmans has every possibly thing (Six different kinds of raw shrimp to choose from! Three different kinds of Tahini! Every single organic vegetable! Liquor and Beer!), I also reflected on the very middle/upper-class American condition of being excited to visit a grocery store that’s as much about leisure as it is about subsistence.

My grocery situation as a small child was all about subsistence. For deli and packs of cigarettes, we had a tiny Vietnamese bodega on our corner, and for other groceries a smallish Stop and Save and Shop or Something on the next block that accepted our food stamps. I remember being mystified by the cheap brands of frozen foods like waffles or steaks that I had never heard of before – because they didn’t advertise on TV.

When an Acme was installed on 80th street it was big news, and the long aisles full of expanded cereal choices and real meat counter seemed like luxuries – likely combined with the fact that we had graduated from welfare with my mom getting her degree and could more readily afford such things.

In college we alternated between a newly-opened Fresh Grocer, which was like a slightly watered-down Whole Foods, and a local Thriftway that Lindsay, Erika and I re-christened “Theftway” for its sometimes-shady customers and peculiar aisle arrangement. Theftway was great for getting cheap name brands, but for anything special, fresh, or healthy we’d take the four block walk to Fresh Grocer.

On our honeymoon the tiny Paris apartment E and I were renting had an impossibly small miniature refrigerator, which meant we needed to restock our food options every other day. That wasn’t so unusual, and the local grocery store reinforced that – it was no bigger than a suburban Wawa and didn’t contain a single super-sized portion of anything. Juices topped out in half gallons, and paper towels came in a max three-rolls-per-pack. When it came to wide varieties, the selection focused on fresh things like cheeses, breads, and juices rather than 100 different kinds of cereal.

We loved it. Bigger doesn’t always have to be better.

Now my local haunt is an impossibly large Giant, which has nearly put our local Acme out of business – it looks dismal by comparison. Not coincidentally, it’s now completely devoid of the upper-middle-class suburban shoppers that used to clog its aisles. After all, Giant has not one but two aisles of healthy and gluten-free foods!

That’s not meant as a knock on GF stuff, since it’s a requirement in our household – more an acknowledgement of the kind of choices that become important to you when you’re not looking for the foods that your WIC check will cover. Recently EV and I had a long wait behind a couple who were trying to figure out what they could cover with WIC checks and what they needed to pay in cash.

After they were finished, the cashier fixed me with a grimace and apologized for the wait. I responded, “No worries, I remember what that was like.”

She gave me a puzzled look in return and started ringing my groceries.

These were my thoughts as Lindsay and I wandered through the stadium-sized Wegman’s. Do we need all of this super-sized choice to be satisfied as consumers? How lucky are we that buying our meals is an act of amusement and convenience? How lucky are we that we can buy them at all?