Today is Monday, March 3, 2008.
It is sunny.
I will go to the grocery store today.
Grocery stores come in many varieties. When I was young I loved to go with my mother to the store. We had no car and so had to walk and carry home in our arms whatever groceries we bought. The A & P Store was about 6 long blocks away from our house. I was just 6 years old and the clerk would make two small light weight bags for me to carry in my arms. Mother's bags were heavier but not too heavy. Two or three years later a small grocery store opened, Dad's Market, which was only three blocks away. I remember that Dad's had hamburger on sale - 3 lbs/$1.00. That was a great bargain.
Mother could make that hamburger go a long way and she could cook up a good many meals for the two of us from 3 pounds of hamburger. Sometimes we would buy a stewing hen (they were cheaper than frying hens) and often she would buy a pound of chicken necks and backs for 10c and make the best chicken and dumplings you ever tasted. That was about the only kind of meat we bought.
I loved the oleo packages - a plastic bag with a pound of white shortening with a little yellow capsule in one corner. The trick was to squeeze the capsule to release the yellow food coloring and then to knead the entire plastic bag until it was all a beautiful yellow and looked like butter.
Of course, we bought the staples - milk, bread, eggs, oatmeal and beans - and whatever fresh fruits and veggies were available at the time. Oh, yes and cheese and dried beef in cute little glasses with metal lids.
About three years after Dad's Market opened a real supermarket opened near us. It was about 3 times the size of Dad's and twice as big as the A & P Store. This was Krogers. Oh, my! What a selection they had! Walking up and down the aisles was like a great adventure.
When I went to college I had my meals in the dorm and didn't do much grocery shopping at all. There was a small store near the campus - Carson's - where we occasionally bought a few items. Then when I got married I fell in love with Albertson's. A huge store and clean and everything I ever wanted. Aisles of fresh fruits and vegetables which looked like magazine pictures. So many choices of canned good. And I found Danish Dessert and Lawry's Taco Sauce. That was in Utah.
Then we moved to California and where we lived there was no Albertsons. I shopped at Safeway and made requests for Danish Dessert and Lawry's Taco Sauce. My answer - "These items do not sell well in California. Therefore, we do not stock them."
"How do you know they don't sell well? If you don't stock them, of course, they won't sell well."
Imagine my delight when a new Albertson Store was built near us. They would order Danish Dessert for me but not Lawry's. My friends in southern California would bring me bottles of the sauce when we met for State PTA meetings. And then the Albertson stores in California began to close.
Now I go to Safeway's and Sam's Club. Once in awhile to Bel Air or Raley's. Some changes come hard.
Except, of course, I am always overwhelmed these days by the selections of food we have in these big stores. When we lived in Pakistan the grocery stores were very different than in the United States. The ones close to us were not very big. They didn't have much variety of canned goods. There was wonderful citrus jam unmatched by any I have tasted since. Fresh fruits and vegetables you bought from the vendors in the streets or at a street market. And those were wonderful. If you wanted chicken you went to the chicken man. He had live chickens in pens and you picked the one you wanted and he got it ready for you to take home and cook. That was a brand new experience for me.
It wasn't had to find sweetened condensed milk. Nestle's had a plant between two of the larger cities. I always wondered why they didn't have chocolate chips, too. But I never found those in Pakistan.
When we were in India for awhile, the grocery stores were small, also. You had to learn the names of what you wanted. I searched a long time for brown sugar until I learned that it was called jugary. And it was interesting that they have a jello-like pudding that sets up without a refrigerator. That's because many of the people where we lived in India didn't have a fridge.
Stores in Greece had lots of pasta and canned tomatoes but not many other canned goods. They had fabulous fish sections and cheese and meats and olives of every size and seasonings. I loved to walk around the cheese section and study the many and varied kinds of cheeses. After living in those areas, coming back to a grocery store in my own home town was overwhelming. I think the number and variety of selections had multiplied more than 10 times. Especially in the salad dressing and the cereal aisles. I am in awe of the many choices we have. It's hard to send anyone to the store for salad dressing. "Get me a French Dressing, please." Well, do you want lo-fat, lo-cal, no fat, lite, regular, zesty, etc, etc? Oh my!
Most of the things I buy when I grocery shop are pretty routine. Milk, butter, eggs, Bisquick, honey, Miracle Whip, carrots, onions, potatoes. But I love to look at all the choices that are there for me. Shopping is an adventure every time. Well, that's all for today.