Europeans can keep their daily market trek
We North Americans are united in our envy of the European lifestyle.
Products billed as Euro-something-or-other always command a hefty premium. European foods and fashions always seem more elegant than our own. Any conversation on politics eventually gets around to how the Swedes and the Norwegians have it all figured out. And so on.
We even envy the way Europeans buy their groceries. They don’t shlep once a week to the supermarket, like we do. No, they do their marketing every day, at quaint local shops where the produce is so fresh there still is mud on it. This is when they connect with friends and neighbours and catch up on the latest gossip. They emerge with a paper bag from which inevitably protrudes a baguette and the top of a celery stalk. Then they repair to their tiny, walk-up apartments, and, in their tiny kitchens, with their tiny appliances, they prepare a magnificent poitrine de poulet farcie au fromage de chèvre et épi-nards. The baguette and celery are just for show, incidentally, and are thrown away untouched.
It’s all so European, so classy, so charming.
Well, I am here to tell you that marketing every day sucks. Europeans should be envying us. How can they live like that?
At our place, we have been compelled to go grocery shopping almost every day for the last three weeks. That’s how long it took, unbelievably, to arrange a replacement for our broken-down fridge, not yet two years old and declared a writeoff. In the meantime, we have been using a tiny, old bar fridge. It doesn’t even have a light inside. To make room for a light bulb, you would have to take out the milk.
As it is, the little fridge can only accommodate a one-liter milk carton, with no backup. When it’s empty, which it pretty much is after you take out the milk, we have to go to the store. Almost anything you normally find in the fridge, we have to get at the store. Thus the European-style daily marketing. I now can confirm from personal experience it gets old on the second day. By the second week, it’s just drudgery, like picking stones. Europeans can keep it.
The one shop we have not visited in three weeks is Costco. There is almost nothing you can buy at Costco that would fit inside our little fridge. They have blocks of cheese at Costco that are bigger than the fridge itself. We could squeeze one of those into our old, big fridge and have cheese for months, and without even putting on our shoes. Now, we have room in the fridge for about three of those cheese cubes you would see on a commercial snack tray. Eat those and you have to go to the store for three more.
The staff at the grocery store are getting tired, too, of seeing me there every day. They think I’m casing the joint or that I’m homeless or something.
Cashier: “That’s three cubes of cheese. Anything else?”
Me: “Not unless you’re selling pickled gherkins individually.”
Ice cubes at our place are a thing of the past. If we want ice, in a drink, say, or on a contusion, we have to go to the service station for a bag of party ice. That’s daily marketing. It helps to explain why so many Europeans have moved to Canada.
Forget about frozen treats. We’re almost into June and I haven’t had a Fudgsicle yet.
We don’t have leftovers, either. Instead, we have leftover. There is only room in the bar fridge for one; it falls out when you open the door.
The one advantage of daily marketing, and it is the only one, is the forced weight loss. Forget about the fad diets and the books and the expensive weightloss systems. If you want to shed excess baggage, lose your fridge. Since ours has been gone, I have been losing weight at the rate of a pound a week. The only other way to lose weight that quickly is with a wasting disease.