“Supermarket automatic doors open for me; therefore, I am.”  Craig Bruce

I love to go to the grocery.  I love it so much that I go at least three times a week.  There are only two of us in my household, and only one of us likes to eat.  That would be me.  I also like to cook.  And nest.  And play June Cleaver.

When I was a little girl back in the fifties, my dad did the grocery shopping.  This was a time when a dad shopping was just plain weird, and I never wanted my friends to know.  I don’t know how the division of labor put him behind the grocery cart, but every Friday on the way home from the foundry, his fingernails lined with dirt, his face still smudged with soot, he bought our food.  When he came home, he called my brother and me to come down to the garage to help carry the bags up.  As soon as the bags landed on our gold-speckled Formica table, I would rummage through them to look for something fun.  Maybe this time there’d be some sugary cereal or chips or Pepsi Cola.  But there never was, unless it was the Friday before my parents’ card club.  The most exotic thing I was likely to find on a non-card club week was a huge bottle of cheap cream rinse which smelled like a used diaper.

I never got the feeling that my dad enjoyed this task.  Maybe he did the shopping because he thought he could do it better than Mom, that he could size up a piece of round steak since he’d been a meat cutter at Albers in high school.  Or that he could stretch a dollar farther or finish the chore more quickly.  All through my growing up years, grocery shopping was the exclusively within the male domain.  I don’t remember my mother shopping even once, nor did I until I was married at nineteen.  I didn’t know that I was supposed to put produce in bags to be weighed. I knew nothing about selecting a melon or a steak, either, but by then I was more discriminating about hair products than my dad, the seasoned shopper.

When we were newlyweds, Rick and I went to the grocery together.  I loved pushing the grocery cart with my new handsome mustachioed husband.  It was so new to me, this domestic chore, and it made me feel grown up.  I learned more about my husband in our first shopping trips together than I had in premarital counseling.  He was not an impulse shopper, and chips and cookies never found their way into our cart.  He didn’t like whole categories of food, like legumes and cruciferous vegetables. And he was thrifty, really thrifty, even though he was making a whopping $7200 as a first-year teacher and football coach at Colerain Jr. High.

We bought the Wednesday newspaper so we could clip coupons.  We were astounded that you could use a coupon to buy a box of salt for seventeen cents, so we bought three.   We bought the cheapest cans of tuna (just a notch above cat food) and store-brand processed cheese (fifteen cents cheaper than Velveeta) so I could whip up my tuna fish noodle dish, which figured prominently in my slim culinary repertoire.  Our first Thanksgiving we bought a twenty-two pound turkey and made little baggies of the leftovers, all twenty-one pounds, and put them in the freezer where they died a freezer-burned death.  At Christmas, Mom and Dad bought us one of those vacuum sealer contraptions and sturdy plastic bags so our leftovers could die a more dignified death.

When our daughter was born, and then our second sixteen months later, I became the grocery shopper.  If I took the kids, this entailed pushing a cart with them in it, and pulling the cart with the groceries.  Then I learned the joy of shopping before dawn.  Our neighborhood Kroger was open all night, so I’d go shopping at 5:00 AM and be back before my husband had to leave for school.  Sometimes my girlfriend and I would babysit each other’s kids so each of us could go to the grocery alone. For seven years after our first child was born, I was a stay-at-home mom.  Going from two salaries to one, and from two mouths to four put my husband’s thriftiness in overdrive.  He wanted to know exactly how we spent our reduced income, so he bought journal where we had to designate where every dime went.  That included the big expenditures, like mortgage and utilities, but also gas, diapers, and groceries.  He wasn’t trying to control my spending, he explained, he was just tracking it.  I soon learned a little loophole.  At the Delhi  IGA, I could make my check out for $20 above my grocery bill, which would allow me to buy clandestine lipstick, doughnuts, and tampons.

Even without the secret spending money it allowed, I still loved the miles I logged behind the grocery cart, checking items off the list, actually getting something done.  I was the boss in the store.  It was sanctioned spending; I mean, I had to feed my family, right?

Whenever someone finds out that we live downtown now, the first question he or she asks is, “Where do you go to the grocery?”  The

Virgin coconut oil?! I only have the slutty kind in my pantry.

answer is we go to whatever grocery we happen to pass when we’re running low on something.  Rick often goes alone to fulfill his predictable needs:  bananas (one for every day he golfs); apples (#4015 Red Delicious); juice (Dole orange/banana/strawberry); and yogurt (in a variety of artificial flavors like pineapple upside down cake and Boston crème pie).  He always calls to see if I need anything, but I usually say no because he’ll sigh loudly if I ask for more than two things or for something even slightly specific, like “Golden Delicious” instead of simply “apples.”  I don’t take him along because he’s always in a hurry and, like my dad, won’t by fun food.

I am not generally a shopper.  I only shop for clothes when I have to, and I have no interest in Coach or Michael Kors or Polo.  And I see nothing fun in stripping in the glare of fluorescent lighting and floor-length mirrors.  Grocery shopping is an entirely different sport.  You never feel guilty doing it because groceries become something nourishing.  You usually like what you buy when you get home, so there are rarely returns.  And you don’t have to take your clothes off before making your selections.

There is so much promise inside of a grocery bag:  thoughts of family sitting around steaming platters and crockery bowls; friends chatting over coffee and pound cake; the sick and the grieving peeking inside Pyrex casserole dishes you’ve delivered.  There is such joy in the abundance and the ability to share with others. I have never been poor, really poor, so there has always been enough food in my pantry.  I don’t know why, then, I feel so compelled to fill the larder.  I only feel content when I don’t have a single thing on my grocery list and when I can make a cake, casserole, or salad without leaving the house.  If I have clipped a recipe from a magazine, I want to know I have every ingredient on hand so I can make it with a moment’s notice.

So, in my pantry, you’ll find sugar:  confectioner’s, brown (dark and light), superfine, and raw, as well as a variety of substitutions:  corn syrup, honey, molasses, agave, honey, Splenda, Sweet n’ Low, and Sugar Twin. Tomatoes:  crushed, diced, sauce, paste, sun-dried, soup, plum, grape. There are black, green, and Kalamata olives.  Vinegar?  Nine types.  When I’ve used the last of the capers – or the anchovies or the pepitas or the green lentils or the coriander–I go to the grocery.

Six years ago, we sold our house and alhttps://fstoppers.com/food/what-week-groceries-looks-around-world-3251l of the furniture, as well as the encyclopedias, Venetian glass tchotchkes, college text books, lawn mower, and almost all of the other junk we’d accumulated over a period of three and a half decades.  I’m proud of this simpler life we’re leading, glad we’ve lightened our load.  But there’s something about a pantry bulging with spices you’ll never use again and yeast that has died and the jar of preserves you bought in Amish country.  It’s, well, comforting, I guess.  Going to the grocery and buying this food when you can afford it and have the time to prepare it is comforting, too.  And knowing that when your neighbor comes to borrow a cup of sugar (which she never does), you’re there for them.  Comforting.  Comfortable.

Check out this site to see what groceries look like around the world:

https://fstoppers.com/food/what-week-groceries-looks-around-world-3251

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