#37 - My Trips To The Grocery Store

I love a good grocery store.

Truly the most redeeming part of going to college upstate was that my 2am breakdowns often occurred in the parking lot of the 24 hour Wegmans before I would wipe my tears and wander through the aisles and buy like 10 bucks worth of pick & mix candy and their generic mac and cheese spirals (which, by the way, were 30cents during the summers when the students were away and over $2 when they were in town. Ithaca haaaaates the college students but also relies on them to keep the town afloat. Inherent tension!).

I feel like even in high school I was a big fan of going to Shaw’s and Price Chopper when my friends and I ran out of things to do (is there anything that makes it more obvious that I didn’t drink or do drugs until college than how many cupcakes I baked during high school sleepovers?).

I love a good browse, a leisured peruse, a discovery of some new product that isn’t new at all but just a repackaged idea sold back to us again (the best innovation in the chip market has occurred in the last decade, so many forms of potato, what a time to be alive!). I go through phases of what I’m buying, especially when it comes to all the seasonal cravings that I now attune to in my ongoing attempts to keep my relationship to food fresh. (Gotta keep that ED guessing! You never know what I’ll do next! Except develop a routine eating schedule, apparently!)

Grocery stores in this city are unlike anywhere else. They’re small, the aisles are packed nonsensically (why would you expect to find tahini anywhere except next to the tampons and above the imported pickled whitefish from Portugal?), and it’s hard to describe the controlled chaos of how to shop at our iterations of Trader Joe’s to people who haven’t gone through the “grab a basket and get in line” style of shopping that is required. Don’t worry, we’ll all be passing the bread section. As a unit. It’ll be fun!

I go shopping in the morning now. Like right when they open, I’m there. Annoyingly I’m often the first one in the store, which is embarrassing for some reason? Other things I find embarrassing at the grocery store: holding my little basket—especially when I’ve just picked it up and it’s still empty, having to pause and ponder what bread I’m actually going to buy, deciding to ultimately not get an item and having to wheel the stupid basket/cart monstrosity around to put it back (because I stocked shelves so I try to not be the woooorst, unlike the woman I saw leave like five loose lemons rolling around the in the dairy aisle) (I have so many questions as to why she thought she needed so many lemons, and what changed her mind while she was looking at the sour cream selections. These are life mysteries I want resolutions to!). I am also harried at the end of it all, trying to shove all my groceries into my silly reusable totes and jamming my card into the world’s most annoying payment system all the while being stared blankly at by the cashier who has literally barely woken up yet and is doing their best.

Anyway! I still love it. (Even after the great Trail Mix Spill of March 2k22.)

And my grocery lists have been changing, because I am steadfast in my “do not order food unless you’re with someone/more than once a month” rule. For a long time, I wasn’t buying cereal. It was $6! (Upon reflection, I was stunned at how much cereal was in my house growing up. I used to mix cereals back in those days, which is, say it with me, the height 👏 of 👏 luxury 👏 ). I also wasn’t getting fun things from the freezer section for nights that I really just didn’t want to cook. And that was when it finally clicked, I could (and should) spend a little more at the store in order to massively cut my spending habits when it came to delivery.

Because it’s not just a money thing, it’s also an “oh getting old means not feeling great in the morning if you eat too much Pad Thai the night before” thing. It’s also a “pay attention to my body instead of punishing it for its current form all the time” thing.

I think the word “optimize” has been absolutely tanked by the WeWork bullshit grind culture of it all, but my grocery list went through so many stages after becoming solely my grocery list. The first iteration was optimized for nutritionally dense, low-cost foods. Then I figured out my budget, but it was still a blend of those two, leaning into the density of it all. I was also repeating a lot of meals because I had figured out what worked, but I wasn’t enjoying them after the third week in a row. What a mystery! Simply could not figure out why I was still so tempted to get Seamless all the time! Until I optimized for joy and remembered that food is fun!

So, I started getting myself treats for going to the store. Fully Pavloved myself! This morning I got a Kinder Bueno. They’re so good, what right do they have to be so crispy and unlike any American candy! Other treats have included: cold brew concentrate, mozzarella pocket things that were wildly expensive but the best things I’ve ever put in the air fryer, string cheese, vanilla oreos (the best oreos, fight me), a surprisingly large package of Haribo gummy bears, fresh orange juice, macadamia milk creamer, and my most extravagant treats these days which is a 12-pack of diet coke.

(And ooooh having Diet Coke in the house is a game. changer. I fucking love it. Height of luxury is a diet coke with a shitton of lime squeezed in and one of my weirdly big straws that I got to encourage myself to drink more water (which totally worked) which are full on dupes for the thickness of a McDonald’s straw so I’m able to recreate the absolute closest thing possible to a fountain diet coke at home and YES this is a full paragraph about how much I love having diet coke in my fridge. Also, fun fact, Coke Zero is not just the masc alt to Diet Coke—DC is based on New Coke’s formula, and Coke Zero is based on the classic Coke formula. Isn’t that neat? It’s not a Dr. Pepper 10 situation! And the children all rejoiced!!)

Anyway, this morning I went and got all the ingredients just to make a salad I saw on TikTok. It’s shaved brussel sprouts, air-fried artichoke hearts, and white beans with a lemon shallot dressing. I am SO EXCITED. Honestly, I wrote this because I’m trying to highlight the joy in my life these days. Like in a personal record kind of way. I made my life really little on purpose in order to control all of the elements and allow myself to heal, and I think that granted me the space to reflect on wants vs needs, but also made the things that I needed to improve more noticeable. And food was definitely a large part of that list. Figuring out what I want to eat and like to eat and actual nutritional balance has been a very long and slow journey, and I am constantly reminding myself that it does no good to beat myself up over the past and to instead look forward to the more bright and delicious future ahead of me.

I think food is joyful and should be a peak of any given day. This week I took the whole week off of work and realized that the thing I think of setting apart vacation from not vacation is the act of cleaning. I don’t mind cooking, but I just want to not have to wash the dishes after when I’m ~resting. I want to be on a break from the world, but I still had to take out the recycling (especially because of all those diet coke cans!) and that was lame, tbh. (The mundane repetition of household tasks is a stunning reminder of the amount of labor that actually goes into keeping a hoooooome. We as a society replaced manual labor with technologies like washing machines in hopes of offsetting that labor altogether, but then just created new tasks and standards to fill that empty time with. Because, we, say it with me now, hate women. Wheee!) (And for more on that check out the You’re Wrong About episode about the Stepford Wives which haunts me to this day, or just read Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work For Mother directly since that’s the source of the mind-bending truths about domesticity and the deliberate undervaluing of traditionally women’s work!)

It’s weird to be living through a global pandemic. It’s weird to feel like the anti-science crowd is now in control of public policy. I hate the implication that we don’t care about each other. I think we do. I can’t imagine the prolonged grief the people who have lost loved ones to this disease are going through because this country in particular is very interested in downplaying and denying their pain. So, I think it’s a really good time to find levity wherever possible. And sometimes it’s stored in the 4lb bag of tangerines that you grab on a whim and end up getting really addicted to since you can now compost the peels and feel incredibly pleased with yourself about the amount of fruit you’re regularly consuming without producing waste.

May all your vegetables stay crisp & your herbs fresh! Snack whilst you cook! && I hope you eat deliciously!!