Commonplace Vol. 6 Issue 1

Hello. In between thinking about the world in general, and trying hard to keep a small marketing business running when lots of people are cutting back on marketing, I’ve been thinking a lot about grocery shopping. So let me talk about that for a while, because it’s a lot more positive than the other topics.

Meditations on Grocery Shopping

I’m trying to establish, in a slow, reasonably methodical way, the best time to go and get the week’s supply of groceries. This is a complicated question, because there are seasonal variations, which aren’t all that apparent until you encounter them (school terms and mid-terms are the big ones), and day-to-day variations for each supermarket, and personal preference of various kinds. I like it when the place is not too busy, the shelves are well-stocked, ideally when stuff has just been moved into the reduced-price shelves and fridges, and the queues for the checkouts aren’t too long. For Tesco, which is where most of my shopping is happening at the moment, this works out to Thursday morning, with a possibility on Tuesday.

Weekends are chaotic in any supermarket. All the people who commute to work five days a week are trying to get their shopping done, and they often have their kids with them. There’s very little that shows you quite how much there’s a background gendering of grocery shopping and cooking in this country than observing families there, though. You can see women on their own with a few small children, herding them around and putting stuff into the trolley, often with no list at all. You see men on their own with a few small children, failing to herd them anywhere, staring at a list in mystification, and telling the kids to put things back, as the kids plonk the thing in the trolley and run off to find something else. Sometimes the men phone home, and stand there with the phone between ear and shoulder, trying to describe the things they’re holding with apparently no context for how to do so. And even in the best of circumstances, some child is screaming somewhere on the premises. So I try to avoid weekends.

Weekdays do feature the occasional bloke wandering around staring in confusion, but usually without children. More usually, you’re looking at well-organised older women (you can tell by their neat lists and the way they’re using the scanners and putting stuff in different bags), the people picking delivery orders, a much higher number of non-white people, and some students. I am convinced I’m some sort of culinary cryptid as far as the students of Maynooth University are concerned; there are very few visits to Tesco that do not include my being asked, often quite out of the blue, by a student how to cook something, what to do with a given ingredient, where to find a particular item (I can often answer that better than the staff) or in one case, whether the chap’s boyfriend would prefer chicken or steak. I said that as long as he eats meat at all, steak was probably the better bet, but you could see the dawning horror of the possibility of vegetarianism in his eyes as I moved away.

I am a moderately organised shopper myself. I know what I’m cooking for the week or so ahead, and I know the kind of fill-in-the-gap supplies I want to have in the house. When something starts to run low, it gets written on a whiteboard in the kitchen, and then transferred to a handwritten shopping list in my current notebook on the morning that shopping is happening. So I’m usually armed with a decent list. I used to write and then re-write lists so that they’d be in the order that the shelves and sections of the supermarket are, but they move things every so often, and while it’s a complete pain to rewire my mental map of where things are, trying to do so for list purposes is even harder, so I no longer bother with that. I often have people trying to look over my shoulder at my list, which amuses me, the more so when there are notes from a game session on the facing page, which is frequently the case. Almost nobody else uses an actual notebook while shopping, as far as I can see.

I’m a big fan of the reduced-price shelves. If you hit them just after they’re stocked, you can get some notable bargains, particularly in meat and fish where the sell-by date is the same day, and I often stock the freezer from those. There was a run in the late summer where every time I went there were meatballs, beef or lamb, for about one-third of the ordinary price, and so we ate meatballs two days a week for about six weeks. There’s one fridge for the meats and fish, one for vegetables and fruit - from which I get fewer things, because they generally take some preparation to freeze - one for other goods including dairy, ready meals, packaged bread and cakes, and then a designated area of shelves for dry goods. The dry goods shelf is incredibly random, I find; among the various just-add-water-or-milk sauce packs, they’ll occasionally have an entire tray of canned vegetables for a fraction of the normal price, not even because the use-by date is coming up, but because they’re clearing the shelves for some newer line. The same frequently applies to things like curry pastes, coconut cream, unusual varieties of dried fruit, and often, seasonal chocolate.

There’s a certain slow march of goods in and out with the seasons. Fruit and vegetables get more varied at this time of year, and you start to see baking supplies taking an uptick. The huge variety of marinaded meats and various forms of chicken on skewers disappeared about a month ago, when barbecue season was “over”, by some corporate measure. Right now, as far as the shelves are concerned, it is time to roast meat, so big chunks of beef and pork are appearing, and the mysterious cook-in-the-bag chickens. There are oddities. Garlic powder could not be got for months earlier this year. Canned pear halves disappeared for a while, but you could still get quarters. Smoked paprika has only just reappeared. Mace is still not available, and hasn’t been for years now, but nutmeg is there.

I find the process of shopping somewhat meditative, in the right circumstances. The first thing is to get Coke Zero, in cans or large bottles depending on the current offers, because they’re heavy and need to go at the bottom of the trolley. Then the bargain shelves, assuming I’m there in good time. Sometimes I find things that are on the list there, which is a double win, but there are very few days I don’t get something. Then I head back, stare at my list, and try to find all the vegetables on it (first section of the market). I will invariably miss something and need to pick it up later, but the vegetable section is right by the scan-and-shop checkout, so that’s fine. Then meat, bread, dairy, frozen goods, dry goods, eggs, preserves, baking supplies, and so on through in order. A sweep back through to pick up the things I missed the first time. All the while I’m looking at the shelves, noting what’s there, sometimes taking pictures of interesting new goods (or weird or outrageous ones), and having a general food-related background hum going on.

I would like to do non-supermarket shopping. There’s a decent greengrocer in Maynooth, an excellent fishmonger, and a couple of good-to-great butchers, and a Polish shop, among others. And there’s undoubtedly some good to be had from shopping across multiple supermarkets, too, if you keep a close eye on quality and price. But it already takes an hour and a half, at the absolute best, to do a supermarket run, including making the list and unpacking, and the general busy-ness of going to multiple locations just doesn’t work out so well when the day job is also calling. If things settle down a bit more with consultancy work, so that I can stop having to hustle for more all the time, I can see about doing some of that too.

What does your shopping look like? I’m very interested in other people’s processes and experiences.

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