I'm Going to the Supermarket to Buy Some Groceries

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I'm going to the supermarket to buy some groceries

after work. I don’t have a list, I’m going to wing it. Old school. I’m a pretty good cook, I think. I don’t need a recipe, I’ll just do whatever feels right. It’s going to be in and out, get some essentials, pick up whatever catches my eye, you know, just kind of go with the flow.

Get some stuff for the weekend so that I don’t have to come back here. What am I going to make? I want to make one of those sandwiches, you know, like the ones in the New York deli places. A reuben. Corned beef, coleslaw, Russian dressing, Swiss cheese on rye. Hell, I’ll make the bread too.

Pasta is easy, a chicken fettuccine sounds good. Get some packs of stir-fry noodles as well—I’ll be up all night writing that blog so I’m going to want something quick and easy.

Woolworths rises up in front of me like the walls of Troy looming before Achilles. No, it’s okay. It will be in and out. My fist clenches involuntarily. There is Christmas music, I’m not ready for that shit yet though. The ham and all that come with it are still a month away, I’m just here for regular food today. In and out.

Collect the trolley and try not to think of why it’s sticky.

Making bread is something I’ve just learned how to do—it’s just flour, water, salt, and yeast, and the rest is intuition. Going to need that flour though and there is no flour aisle in this supermarket.

Every aisle is marked with an overhead sign but not every sign tells the whole story. The labels are cryptic, not clear directions but clues that need to be deciphered. This is not a straightforward task, it’s like that old Jennifer Connelly movie where she gets trapped in a labyrinth full of muppets. It had David Bowie in it, god, what was it called?

Where would I find flour? It’ll be near something it’s associated with, surely. But it’s not with biscuits and cookies, which are in the chocolates aisle. That reminds me that I want to get some snacks. Not chocolate though, some bags of chips or something. Chips aren’t in the aisle with the chocolates even though the aisle with the chocolates is confidently labelled SNACKS.

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Flour was one of the first things human beings learned to make after we began farming. It’s about as much a staple as anything we’ve ever invented, it was a turning point for our entire species. There should be monuments dedicated to it. It doesn’t even get its own section in the supermarket. After wandering around a while In search of it I put the quest on the backburner and try to limit my search to what’s close. It’s going to be in and out, I will not wander around lost and annoyed for half an hour like I did last time.

So – coleslaw. That means mayonnaise. I don’t remember if we have any mayonnaise at home. It’s likely that we have several almost-full bottles that were each used exactly once and purchased fresh every time I couldn’t remember if we had mayonnaise. But nothing will work if we don’t have it. I was talking to a colleague at work the other day and he was saying how much he loved coleslaw but also mentioned that he couldn’t eat anything with mayo, couldn’t stand that shit. I looked at him confused and said “So… you mean shredded cabbage?”

So here’s the thing—is mayo a sauce or is it a spread? Two different aisles. I decide to check the sauces. Very familiar products, I’m definitely on the right track. Tomato sauce. Barbecue sauce. Tabasco sauce. Sriracha. Yellow mustard. Worcestershire. Soy sauce. Vinegarette.  Caeser dressing. French dressing. Hold on, record scratch—I feel like I’m getting colder. At some point I wound up in salad dressing town.

That’s okay—I remember that I’m going to need Russian dressing for the reuben sandwich. Embarrassing admission: I don’t know what Russian dressing is. I scan the bottles in front of me: Caeser, Ranch, Italian, French, Thousand Island, Honey mustard which isn’t shelved with the other mustard for some reason so thank god I wasn’t looking for that. There’s a dressing for every country on Earth except Russia, it’s like I’m at the fucking Salad UN.

I’ve thought time and time again that it’s kind of crazy that nobody has invented an app. You know, like Google Maps except it’s the supermarket and it shows you where to find the stuff you want to find. Like Pokemon GO except for tinned beans. And you know I’m pretty sure it’s an actual conspiracy, like you can’t make an app like that because people wouldn’t spend as much time in the supermarket if that existed. They want to keep you here, trapped like in that Bowie movie with the freaky blue haired worm thing that became my sleep paralysis demon until I was 12.

I get out my phone and I look up Russian dressing. Here’s a guy making his own. He’s adding tomato sauce, lemon juice, and… mayonnaise. Great.

Off to the spreads aisle to try my luck there. On the way through I pass the sign that says PASTA. That’s on my list, definitely taking this detour.

After scrutinising the shelves for some time it starts to become apparent that there is no fresh pasta in the PASTA section. They only have the dried stuff—macaroni, spaghetti, those spiral things. No fettuccine. But they do have ramen here, and mi goreng, just hanging out with the San Remo macaroni. I guess noodles are pasta? I’d ditch the pasta and just get the noodles but I want udon and I can’t find those either.

Moving on then. I locate the spreads. It’s my first major victory. I’ve been here 20 minutes. But now that I’ve got my bearings relatively straight I think it’s all going to be looking up from here. The spreads are in the SPICES section. First thing I see is Dijon mustard. It suddenly occurs to me how diverse and vastly scattered the mustard diaspora is. Mayo is here, as is horseradish, another dressing component.

See, this isn’t so hard.

A woman with a small child is nearby. The child’s patience wears thin. If this shopping trip is annoying me, a grown adult, then I can only imagine how short this kid’s fuse is. Her face is swelling up. She’s had it. She begins to draw in air. She’s charging her weapons.

I flee to the next aisle over. The sign says SUGAR. There are at least a dozen different types of sugar—white, brown, caster, icing—and most of them are the exact same thing, just ground into different grain sizes or refined to a different degree of purity. What isn’t the same thing is flour, which is interesting because that’s what I see in front of me camouflaged between several packs of sugar varieties. What strange taxonomy puts flour under the umbrella of SUGAR I’m sure I do not know, but I’ll take it.

I hear the scream from one aisle over. The child has fired her weapon. Full tantrum mode. The rest of this trip will involve the added complication of putting as much space between myself and that child as possible.

I enter the aisle marked ASIAN and the first thing I see is Old El Paso taco shells. This isn’t surprising. In white people grocery stores anything with an aroma of ethnicity is ASIAN. Here I find my udon noodles which, unlike ramen noodles, are ASIAN enough to be shelved between the curry paste and the salsa. Nearby there’s an entire section simply labelled NEW ZEALAND.

The next aisle is fruit juice and I remember the lemon juice but I have absolutely no expectation of finding that here. I do take a cursory look but my suspicions seem to be validated—lemon juice, you see, is not a type of fruit juice. Oh, but look at this—pickle juice is fruit juice, and now I’m really starting to catch on. I see now how things work around here. It’s clown town. I have awakened into madness. I have birthed into a world where flour is sugar and I see now why the child screams. I too must scream.

Fucking cheese.

Cheese goes on the sandwich. A reuben is made with Swiss cheese, that much is insisted upon by every recipe I’ve ever seen. But wherefore art thou cheese? Naturally I go to the DAIRY section. It seems evident that cheese would be DAIRY but oh my sweet child no. Milk is DAIRY. Yoghurt is DAIRY. Cream is DAIRY. Bafflingly, eggs are DAIRY. I scry the shelves for cheese until my eyes set upon a packet of fettuccine and I just stare at it a while and weep a little bit.

I have to circumnavigate the entire store like Magellan before I come across cheese, which is so far from DAIRY that I might as well have been looking for Inuit in Antarctica. Still, though I allowed myself to imagine I had reached Valhalla, the dream was again ripped from me. Cheese, my darling, refers to cheddar, parmesan, mozzarella, cottage cheese, and cream cheese. There is no Swiss here.

For you see, Swiss cheese is a charcuterie cheese. Like camembert, like red Leicester, you idiot. You fool. That is it’s own thing.

It’s with the prosciutto.

I am ordering a pizza.

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