An escapism we all need
The joys of grocery shopping (and memories of markets past) now pass for travel
It’s another grisly January day in lockdown, silver-bellied clouds hang low and motionless, as if preserving energy, and hostile winds feel almost fanged. It’s time for an adventure, I tell my husband. “Are we driving to another country?” my six-year-old son, Leo, says from the back seat, 30 minutes into our odyssey. “Basically,” I say.
After nearly an hour, we pull into our destination: Lady York Foods, a 60-plus-year-old Italian grocer in a featureless strip mall in North York. As we cruise the fluorescentlit aisles, and I repeatedly instruct Leo with rising panic to avoid crashing into the vitreous towers of EVOO, we pass hillocks of plump fresh figs, glossy heaps of quinces and piles of clementines festively dressed in their green-stemmed cravats. I may as well be riding a Vespa, citrus-scented breeze in my hair, around Lake Como. This is what it’s come down to: in the age of COVID, grocery shopping is what passes for travel.
I’ve been thinking a lot about grocery shopping over the past two years, likely because I’ve done such a great deal of it. As the pandemic stretches interminably on, and Omicron continues to tyrannize us with restrictions and the singular unending hell of school closures, grocery shopping has served as an outlet, an escape — a transgression, even.
Grocery shopping — the aforementioned family getaway to Lady York notwithstanding — is one of the few things I tend do alone. I have found excuses to go, often visiting several stores in one outing to prolong my time off — in the same way, in my 20s and early 30s, I might have gone to an after-hours bar after last call to top off the debauchery.
A friend in my neighbourhood with two young children called me the other day to relate a recent adventure. She had gone to a molemapping with her derm — the sort of medical appointment that now moonlights as “me time” — but instead of dutifully heading straight home, she found herself spontaneously buying rugelach at a place called Kosher City Plus.
“It was amazing,” she told me, post grocery high, as if basking in the glow of a beach vacation. “Fifteen years ago, I would have been in a village in Bali or a small town in Uruguay or something. Now…” A few minutes later, she sends me a text: “I’m going to a Persian grocer for pistachios tomorrow.”
At the risk of being grocery shamed, I will now admit that at the bleakest moments of lockdown, I would take myself to a certain Italian grocer in Rosedale where larcenously priced produce is curated like jewels in a Van Cleef & Arpels vitrine. Here, mangoes whose ancestors might have once modelled for Gauguin lounge around sunflushed peaches and the kinds of apples and pears that look like they wandered off a Cézanne canvas.
I’d promenade the aisles overspending on, say, designer watermelon radishes to the mellifluous sound of Italian radio (this particular place always plays Italian radio, and it is a delight), occasionally stopping to consider bankrupting myself over ambrosial heaps of muscat grapes — their romantic pinkish, greenish, purplish complexion uncannily similar to the hue of the bags under my eyes.
In what has been an unending season of scarcity and deprivation, grocery stores promised bounty and beauty. (It’s not all indulgence and delight, mind you: a look at the price tags can provide a certain frisson of adrenalin, in the form of financial panic.) As life became more virtual and isolating, I developed what I can only call a dependence on the sensory gluttony of the city’s produce aisles — filling the evergreedy drawers of my refrigerator, and bien entendu, the vacancy in my soul.
Growing up, I saw grocery shopping as a love language — an expression of attention and nurturing. So, perhaps I am ripe (forgive me) for this pandemic habit. If I now grocery shop to travel, I once travelled to (among other things) grocery shop. In the same way that the contents of a family’s fridge can telegraph the anatomy of a household in all its secret pathologies, a grocery store (or market) is a city’s animating heartbeat, reflecting a neighbourhood/city/country’s political and emotional life.
I still love going to South Florida if only to shop at Publix. As a child, I’d visit my grandmother in Palm Beach with my parents and sister, usually around Christmastime or spring break, and those memories are tied up in visiting the local Publix. The supermarket’s tag line was (is) “Where Shopping is a Pleasure,” and it welcomed shoppers with conch-shell pink, bougainvillea-draped archways. I loved watching tycoons wandering the aisles in louche robes and monogrammed slippers, shopping for crab salad, as their chauffeurs waited outside in purring Bentleys.
More glamorous, even, was the Inno (which later became a Monoprix) in Paris’s Montparnasse — I’d come here with my aunt who lived around the corner. We’d stroll the cheese aisle, a runway of dairy as long as the Seine, then take in the fragrant hillsides of golden Reine Claude plums and velvety, pinkcheeked apricots.
If these stores stand out in my memory, so do some of the spoils. Apricots I bought and immediately consumed at a fruit market in Aixen-Provence doomed every subsequent apricot experience to depressing mediocrity. Once, on a trip to San Francisco, I visited the 80year-old, family-owned Bi-Rite market, and bought a memorably delicious, hot-pink-fleshed apple. The store — with its glazed tiles and art-deco facade, creamery and flower stalls, and farm-direct produce — is, I feel, what every grocery store should be (i.e. the kind of place Diane Keaton would grocery shop in a Nancy Meyers movie).
On that same trip to San Francisco, I bought a pomelo at the Saturday farmer’s market at the Ferry building. I absurdly brought this small yellow planet back to enjoy the next day in my hotel room, and I’ve been searching for the perfumed perfection of that citrus since. I shared this pomelo moment with a friend, who told me he ate a Concord grape in 1985 that he’ll never forget.
I thought of my friend’s transcendent grape experience the other day, when I took myself to Mattachioni, an Italian-restaurantturned-grocer in the East End. I bought some jars of (excellent!) house-pickled hot sauce, and watched a man gaze up at a glassbottled collection of Brio soda in a state of stunned rapture. “I’ve never seen these flavours before,” he told me, almost bewitched, as if taking in the frescoes at the Sistine Chapel. Yes, I know, I’m on Gerrard Street, I’m hardly in Vatican City. Tomato, tomahto.