Supermarket free living

If only they were ever this empty

Three minutes later I left the shop without any milk, partially because I had to be somewhere else and didn’t have time to queue, and partially because I had come to a sudden realisation.

Recently I have been hugely disturbed by the feeling that I might just be falling out of love with food. While I was waiting in a painfully slow line towards the checkout, I worked my way through a little mental checklist:

Do I still love eating food? ?

Do I still love cooking food? ?

and then the problem became clear:

Do I still love buying food? ?

There it is then, I have had become complete disenchanted with the act of shopping for food.

Having come to this realisation and still being without milk (and having a five year old who loves the stuff), I decide that a plan is needed. I have to do something to change my food shopping habits so that I can start to enjoy it again. It’s been a few years (and a few countries) since I really loved shopping for food, it is just that I haven’t noticed that something has been lacking until this particular morning.

So, a plan is needed, and preferably a radical one, something that will create real change and not just a temporary buying of milk in a different place. Something a bit extreme, maybe.

NO SUPERMARKETS

I’m not about to go on a big tirade about how supermarkets are evil, because they aren’t. I’m not about to launch into a vitriolic attack on big businesses taking away custom from family businesses, etc. I believe that supermarkets have their place, and that they are bloody useful actually, I’ve just decided that I am going to try and do all of my shopping without going to one.

Not surprisingly given the way that this whole episode started, my first problem lay with milk.

Meat you buy in a butchers, veg in a greengrocers, wine in a wine shop, etc. but where do you get milk? I ended up getting it in the butchers of all places, but I did pay almost 30 cents a litre more than I would of in the supermarket, which was a bit painful.

The second problem was in buying anything at all. I can wander up to the checkout in any supermarket with whatever cash I happen to have and not have a problem. My local little fruit and veg man on the other hand couldn’t change my ?50 note, neither could the bakery just down the road from him. Temporarily thwarted I retreated home to look for small change and contemplate which shop might be able to break my fifty for me.

A few hours later I was out on my mission again. In the off license I picked up the first Spanish chardonnay that I’ve ever tasted, which is fantastic and cost no more than anything I might of grabbed in the smarket. In the grocers I spent 10 minutes discussing different varieties of orange and came away with a big bunch of fresh mint for free (since used for Moroccan tea). I bought green assam tea in the tea shop, and got beautiful fluffy warm baguettes from the bakery just down the road.

After siesta I went on the hunt for some olive oil, I’d planned to buy some fantastic locally produced oil in a vegetable shop that I know not too far away, but when I got there they didn’t have any of that wonderful honey-yellow goodness, so I ventured just across the road to a shop specialising in ‘productos ibericos’, where after a bit of a chat and tasting of a couple of different extra virgins I came away with something fantastic, with a very mellow start and a lovely bitter aftertaste.

In less than 12 hours I had realised what it was that I was missing about food, and had enjoyed my daily shopping more than I have for months or even years.

Coming soon: Day two – the juice hunt