Other people's groceries
On shopping lists, muesli recipes and change
Started in April, finished now—you know how it goes.
I got home from a reporting trip and felt a compulsive need to buy groceries.
Now, I understand that many people use shopping as a way to feel better. This did not seem to be my modus operandi, perhaps because I associate emotional shopping with clothes. And I had just shopped for clothes, to my utter misery. This reporting trip was on-camera, for my first and possibly last time. I was required to buy button-down shirts and a blazer. My inner nine- and 16-year-olds lost their shit. As did my inner and outer 46-year-old. I despise blazers and all button-down shirts except linen, which was out because one can’t look wrinkled on camera. I had to buy and return so many button-down shirts that I lost count at 15.
Clothes-shopping, especially for work, is self-torture. Grocery-shopping, however, is self-care.
Last night I went to the gym, which shares a parking lot with a mediocre supermarket. Even though I wasn’t on the brink of running out of anything, and the market didn’t have the item I was actually out of (contact lens cleaner), I bought:
peanut butter
soy milk (because when I use the container already in my fridge I will need another container)
yogurt
white rice
tahini
tofu (because when I use the container already in my fridge I will need another container)
tempeh (because I should switch up the vegan proteins)
Today I have online-shopped for, but not yet bought, three varieties of Italian nonalcoholic apéritifs, and my shopping list already lists the following:
contact lens solution
long lighter (can’t light a beehive smoker with wooden matches)
coffee
cat litter
Twizzlers
Other people get influenced by soft sweatshirts on Instagram. I get influenced by Holly Whitaker substacking about Italian beverages.
I am practically sitting on my hands telling myself not to go. Or, at least, telling myself just to run to the pet store and pick up a single bag of cat litter.
Note the prevalence of items I want to replace before they run out. How much should one buy at once, especially living alone? What is sensible, and what is compulsive?
I did not hoard goods in early COVID, perhaps because my then-partner and I already had a full pantry, perhaps because we lived in a house with no basement, no attic and just 1-1/2 closets.
I do remember the odd emptiness of constraining my grocery trips that first year. From stopping at the store on my way home many nights per week, I switched to maybe one trip per fortnight, plus a second to pick up vegetables from a café and a restaurant wholesaler that switched business strategies.
Now I live with Team Tabby in a house that can easily accommodate a six-pack of shelf-stable soy milk. It has an upstairs, a downstairs and a basement (my dream). But buying one or two things at a time is a hard habit to break. In Somerville I used to bike home and stop on the way at Market Basket (oh, how I still miss you, Market Basket, 11 years later), picking up just enough to fit in the basket.
The romantic term for grazing-style grocery shopping is “European.” The harsh term is “inefficient.” Even with a list, it is very un home economics-y. The home ec way is to place a giant order and get it delivered, à la peak pandemic.
Take this advice, from 1960: “To save time, gas, and wear and tear on your car and yourself, Miss Phyllis Snow, a professor at the New York State College of Home Economics at Cornell University, encourages you to learn to do a week’s grocery shopping at a time. She does not recommend driving from store to store to take advantage of ‘specials’ unless the savings are exceptional.”
Snow also recommended creating a system for tracking staples in short supply, and organizing one’s shopping list according to the store floor plan. Home economists of her generation dreamed of a smart fridge and pantry that monitored usage and ordered for us.
If my fridge bought my groceries, how would I take care of myself?
I could undoubtedly write a book on single-person homemaking, and the most impractical kind, too. I watch The Cottage Fairy’s videos on YouTube. Alas for Ellen Swallow Richards, who died 110 years ago, I still have a weakness for the taste of my own kitchen bacteria, and thus the difficulties of right living will continue.
Speaking of lists. I shared mine because I quietly believe that everyone is fascinated by other people’s groceries. Or, I suppose, anyone who reads this newsletter. I find Diane di Prima’s Dinners and Nightmares—which I was hipped to by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones—utterly compelling, at least the dinners part.
I always check what’s on the supermarket conveyor belt—don’t you? It might be the biggest loss of the self-checkout station. A boyfriend once picked a fight with me because he caught me eyeing someone else’s groceries on the checkout line. This is a small town, he said, you can’t … be nosey? let it be seen that you are nosey? What else are small towns about?
Had I only known, I could have directed him to my one of my enduringly favorite articles from Illinois Teacher of Home Economics magazine: ideas for teeny-tiny vacations, where associate professor Mary Mathers says she likes to “observe selection of groceries in baskets at the super-market and speculate about the situations in which they might be used.”
I write my shopping lists in a 3” x 5” notebook. Currently they share space with powerlifting workout instructions. All those repeats of “cheese sticks” and “yet more yogurt” make so much more sense next to the details of my bench press sets.
These 3” x 5” shopping list notebooks are my only truly ephemeral notebook. I throw them out as soon as they’re full. Usually they’ve lost one third of their pages by then anyway. I keep the reporting steno pads at least until I change beats or move; the datebooks and journals, forever. It’s a bit of a shame, though. Wouldn’t it be interesting to look back at old grocery lists and see what you bought?
If I had my old grocery lists, I could see when soppressata became a constant in my fridge, and then when I stopped buying it because every brand tasted too gamy. (That’s sometime after Barry Estabrook talked about pigs on “Fresh Air,” which the internet tells me is 2015. You should not listen to that episode if you want the option of eating factory-farmed pigs ever again without disgust.)
I can remember, with fuzzy time boundaries, my nonfat yogurt phase and my full-fat plain yogurt phase. Nothing precise. These corresponded to genuine changes in myself. When did I stop punishing myself with nonfat dairy? Last summer, when I started powerlifting, I switched to 2% Greek yogurt, for The Macros. It’s not as lush and delicious as Seven Stars non-strained yogurt, but Mama wants muscles.
Or take breakfast. I have been eating the same muesli most days for more than 20 years. It comes from Didi Emmons’ first? cookbook, owned by my meanest roommate, a book so old it doesn’t have an e- version. I loved that muesli so much that I brought it on my visits to that small-town boyfriend, packaged in an Ikea jar I bought with him in Ottawa and still own.
But without thinking about it, I adapted that muesli recipe again and again until it became like the koan: If you change every cell in your body every seven years, are you the same person? What about three times seven years? When did I change, and how? I could look back at those grocery lists. They would tell me something.
After drafting the above, I managed to sit on my hands for several more days. When I finally went to the supermarket, I spent over $100. Then I went through my spending for the last year and calculated that I spent, on me myself and I, a jaw-dropping $475/month at the supermarket. (Plus $130/month on Team Tabby’s food and litter. That’s going up, because Action Cat just got prescribed a hydrolyzed protein diet.)
Thanks to Google Books, I found …
Didi Emmons’ very old muesli recipe
4-1/2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup toasted wheat germ
1/2 cup wheat bran
1/2 cup oat bran
1 cup raisins, currants or chopped dried fruit such as apricots or apples
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or almonds
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup shelled, unsalted sunflower seeds (optional)
Mix, obviously.
To my surprise, my current version is not so far away from this. There were years I diversified into other rolled grains. I believe those were the Central Square Harvest Co-op years; Harvest had rolled rye and maybe even rolled barley flakes, and I think the Cambridge Whole Foods did too. Now I can find rolled rye only from brewing-supply stores, so I don’t bother. I quit adding sugar long ago and dried fruit less long ago—I add them when serving, if I want. The nuts have taken many, many trips around the bulk-bin aisle, and I’m currently using cacao nibs. I usually add dried ginger and turmeric as well. Sometimes random other seeds, though I try not to cross into the territory of my favorite quickie flatbread recipe.
Which reminds me I’m out of flax seeds. Must add to shopping list.
Minor self-promotion
Finally all my work for Gannett shows up on my profile page. That will include, June 21 or so, the results of that reporting project: what it’s like to be pregnant in Mississippi after Dobbs. Interviewing those women was worth the blazer and the button-down shirts and the fact that I literally, h/t the late, great Cynthia Heimel, applied four shades of lipstick to make it look like I just had naturally pink lips.
I got the Japanese copies of The Secret History of Home Economics, which is cool.
I have not yet bought the Italian nonalcoholic apéritifs.
This has made me smile, and focus more on my lists!