You Can Learn a Lot About People by Visiting a Supermarket

Today being Monday, I had to restock my groceries. Every Monday I cook a dish which serves as our main meal for three, four, or five days. That’s usually true, but Martine is suffering from another round of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, so she’s reduced to eating foods that do not have vowels in their names. My dish for today was ratatouille, a vegan stew of onions, tomatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, and squash. Today I ate it straight; the rest of the week, I’ll eat it with pasta.

It’s always interesting to visit supermarkets in other places. I remember the ATAC market near the Place de Clichy in Paris, where Martine and I shopped for our breakfasts for the four or five days we stayed in the area. The market wasn’t huge like many American chains, but it had good food—especially the Petit Billy goat cheese.

Compared to ATAC, Ralphs Supermarket at Olympic and Cloverfield in Santa Monica is loaded down with frou-frou that I would never consider buying, like expensive boxes of sugary breakfast cereals. Is it so much trouble to add sugar that everything has to come pre-sugared, and “fortified” with corn sweeteners as well. There are many aisles in the supermarket that I never visit, because they have nothing that interests me.

And why are there so many varieties of certain foods? I looked for my Jif Extra Crunchy peanut butter and had to settle for a large size because there were about ten different varieties of Jif Creamy for adherents of various loony dietary regimens. Thanks, but I don’t want any peanut butter with kale and quinoa. There are easily a hundred different brands of potato chips, and almost as many of corn chips (though I always have a difficult time finding Santita’s Corn Chips, which are perfect even though they are now owned by FritoLay.