touch your groceries
The best time of year for buying groceries has arrived. I’m giddy to go to the farmers market every Saturday, and I’ve driven to a farm in southern Maryland each of the past two weekends to pick berries. I have no interest in going to restaurants; all I want to do is look inside my fridge and figure out a creative way to use all the produce that’s overflowing from every drawer and corner.
This week’s essay, then, is a bit of a confession — of my worst food-buying habit, and the really simple pleasures I’ve found since kicking it
“It’s possible to get peaches in Alaska in December. Evian is sold in Nairobi. You can buy sushi in Dubai. This twisted idea of availability not only spoils people but causes them to lose track of where they are in time and space. With this constant availability, seasons stop mattering. Suddenly, what’s indigenous to certain places becomes unclear, maybe even irrelevant. Local culture and the specialness of what’s happening here and now become less important than the big, homogenized, get-anything-you-want-whenever-you-want-it global reality — or unreality.”
Alice Waters, “You Are What You Eat”
For the good part of three years, I barely stepped foot in a grocery store. It started, as so many bad habits did, in the spring of 2020. I’d never had groceries delivered before, and there was something unfathomable and calming about being a few clicks and a good tip away from a bunch of brown bags appearing on my doorstep.
It was too easy. As the months passed and the pandemic eased — and my reason for having groceries delivered evaporated — I kept at it. One day, I ordered two jalapeños for a spicy chimichurri and got two pounds. Another time, instead of ginger, I got a desiccated, potato-sized horseradish root, plastic-wrapped to oblivion. Sometimes, chicken thighs meant chicken breasts or drumsticks or tenders. Parsley, cilantro, arugula — they were all interchangeable.
For the record: These mistakes were no one’s fault but mine. I kept swiping and clicking through insipid asparagus and every imaginable cut of poultry rather than grabbing a few canvas totes and walking six blocks. The app instructed shoppers to grab an onion, a pork butt, a tomato — not the shiniest onion, the most marbled pork butt, the ripest tomato — and that’s exactly what they did. Meanwhile, I shrugged and accepted the hazards of the whole endeavor as if I had no other choice. When life delivers you two pounds of jalapeños, infuse tequila.
That’s all to say I was fully entrenched in grocery delivery when, over the winter, I picked up Alice Waters’s “We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto.” I knew about Waters from reading Ruth Reichl and seeing Chez Panisse referenced almost every time I read about a world-famous chef; she’s the mother of farm-to-table cuisine in the United States, a complete radical when it comes to food, and she’s spent years working to integrate organic food into our country’s education system.
According to the New York Times, Waters hasn’t shopped in a conventional supermarket in decades — preferring farmers markets, not delivery apps, of course — and some of her ideas in “We Are What We Eat” would be difficult for most people to adopt, for reasons that range from economic to practical. But I admire the idealism that’s woven through Waters’s writing and beliefs, and one chapter of the book, about availability, really stood out for me.
In it, Waters writes about how accustomed we’ve all gotten to getting what we want, when we want it. (Check out the pull quote at the top of this essay.) There’s app after app built to bring me everything I have a fleeting fancy for, quickly, for a fee. It can seem as if my phone is conspiring to keep me inside my house, at an even greater remove from the food I want to eat and where it came from.
Before I was halfway finished with reading, I made one resolution: I was done with grocery delivery.
In the months since, I’ve stuck to my rule, and it’s been just about the easiest and most obvious life change anyone has ever made. I waste less food. I’m more creative when I cook. And I’ve learned so much by looking at groceries — and poking and prodding and smelling. I’ve remembered what’s in season and why I should buy produce that’s actually being harvested off of bushes and vines and trees right now, and not far from me. I’m not perfect — who doesn’t want an avocado in February? — but I’m satisfied. What I’m buying is fresher, better, and because it’s better, I’ll do everything I can not to waste it. That’s meant pickling blueberries and making strawberries into simple syrup. I’m working up the courage to eat radish leaves.
A more practical benefit: After months of skyrocketing grocery prices, I’ve gained the ability to be discerning. Maybe a squash looks so amazing, it’s worth the sickening price tag. Maybe a particularly mealy pile of potatoes means I need to come up with a new side dish. Maybe there’s a cracked egg in this carton or a sad look to that dill. Online stock photos tell us nothing about the increasingly wallet-vanquishing selection that’s actually on our local grocery store’s shelves.
Earlier this week, I spent at least two minutes scrutinizing a lineup of blood-red ribeye steaks in the butcher’s case, deciding if there was one big enough to feed my husband and me, or if I’d have to buy two. The butcher asked if I was all right, then offered to weigh the one I’d eyeballed and decided was heftiest. It was perfect. I walked it home, reverse-seared it and made a pan sauce with butter and pickled blueberries. There were no leftovers.
It’s not a sin to get your groceries delivered, or to bite into a strawberry in October and not really care that you’re getting the well-traveled, watered-down version. The average person can’t be a food absolutist. But I’m so grateful I’ve remembered how much more fun shopping for food can be without a screen between me and everything I want to eat.