What gets my attention about being home isn’t the milk
aisle. You know, that old
stereotype of encountering 10 brands of milk in 14 sizes and 23 flavors with
something like 47 different percentages of milkfat, comparing it to that
glorified mythical third-world country you used to live in, where you just
bought “milk” and things made sense and nothing was ever wrong, and then having
a breakdown right there on the tile floor you never even noticed the color of
before under florescent lights and then oh look, it’s that girl who used to
bully you in high school, and you swore you’d come back from Africa and,
amongst other things, impress all the hometowners with your international poise
and experience, but clearly that’s not going to happen because “Jenny” the
grocery stock girl who used to throw spit-balls at you is now watching you
hyperventilate on the floor because you held the fridge door open too long
staring at milk labels and now you’re worried about wasting the electricity and
making the power go out as the cold air rushes out into your face and then you
remember that this is America the power doesn’t usually randomly go out in the
grocery store like it did back home and good GOD is that air cold—
No, that hasn’t happened yet. Mostly because I haven’t bought any milk yet.
These days I’m more of a yogurt person.
So I went to the Hannaford supermarket the other day, to buy
the food my mother didn’t know to buy for me because she hasn’t been in any way
responsible for feeding me for a couple of years now, because I’ve been in
Africa. It’s the same Hannaford
supermarket, minus a few renovations and re-organizations and name-changes,
that I’ve been going to since I was 10.
The fruit section hit me first with a cold wet blast, like always, fresh
Maine apples shoved in your face in front of the dwindling last dregs of the
slightly unfresh summer berries.
The vegetables were shoved against the wall where they couldn’t offend
anybody, and the more pricey fruits were brightly lit on tables in the center,
so that you could still feel confident that you were shopping in the “healthy”
section when it suddenly turned into the bakery, cheese, and precooked meals
area. Yes, I’m sure these donuts
are better for you, because they’re fresh and next to the pineapples. The tempura sushi, rotisserie chickens,
and mozzarella sticks are all in line with the bananas, which are all green and
bizarrely huge, because they are easy foods to prepare, or not prepare,
compared to the spinach which I eventually found huddled in the corner next to
the kale and “organic” basil. As I
would later remember, no one wants to buy food they have to cook.
But none of this got to me, because it’s all stuff I
remember from my childhood, even if it is a bit strange and tilted now from
this angle. What got to me was
this:
None of this stuff was outside.
I mean, yes, Africa has an indoor supermarket, sometimes,
and sometimes even more than one.
Not so much in the Zambian villages where you’re lucky to find food if
you actually go to a village tuck shop (like a city newspaper kiosk, except made
of grass or mud-brick and mostly selling sweets, biscuits, cell phone minutes
(called “talktime”), and little plastic bags of sugar to put in your opaque
local beer), but in the towns there were general stores and butcher shops that
occasionally had meat and cheese, and “specialty” general stores that sometimes
had tuna or Pringles or, on one memorable occasion, olive oil. In towns with more than one paved road
and a stoplight (like Kasama, where I spent my 3rd-year assignment)
they actually have SHOPRITE, a South-African grocery store chain built in the style
of any large chain supermarket anywhere in the world, and, like in America,
these stores were very much inside.
Sure, the Kasama supermarket maybe wasn’t the grand
amusement park of all supermarkets, it wasn’t a Wholefoods knockoff (you had to
go to Lusaka for that) and it didn’t sell novelty items like nutella or Doritos
(again, Lusaka), the milk was often sour when you bought it, the freezer
section rarely sold anything but frozen whole fish, favorite items like icing
sugar or olive oil or sweet chili sauce would suddenly and randomly be out of
stock just when you needed them, and worst of all there were “novelty items,”
things like feta cheese that would show up quite by accident through a delivery
error and you’d be excited but no one else would know what to make of it so
when the cheese ran out or expired it would never show up again and all your
dreams of happiness would be dashed to smithereens…but it was still a
supermarket. It still had aisles
and carts and cash registers, and a donut section and those same little fruit
islands cooling the entrance, and even florescent lighting when the electricity
was working.
But the point is, in Zambia, in addition to the regular
globalized supermarket model, there would be a more traditional market
sprawling from the entrance out into the parking lot and down the paved
streets. The brick outer walls
would be lined with tables selling watches and second-hand shoes knock-off cell
phones. Women with plastic baskets
on their heads would hustle between the eager crowd of smiling taxi drivers
loitering at the store entrance to show you their supply of carrots and
avocados. Women would sit on mats
and tables at the parking lot gates selling tomatoes, onions, potatoes, cabbage. There were bananas inside the
supermarket, green and absurdly large on those familiar universal fruit
islands, but there were also small local-variety bananas in bunches on the side
of the road. There was a bakery at
the back of the supermarket that never had any bread, because early every
morning bread-sellers would swarm the supermarket, buy everything they had, and
spend all day outside the supermarket door re-selling that same bread for 50
cents more. The supermarket was
indoors, sure, but the food, the world, the people, the culture, was all
swarmed around the outside, waiting for you when you got outside.
The difference isn’t that American has supermarkets and the
African continent does not. The
difference isn’t even that the supermarkets are that different—walk into a
supermarket in Lusaka and you will not know what country you are in, it could
be anywhere in the whole world.
The difference is that, in America, supermarkets generally tend to stay
inside the supermarket. In Zambia,
the market stretches out the door, into a crowd of eager taxi drivers who
hustle every emerging shopper into their dilapidated cars, women carrying small
local bananas in baskets on their heads, teenagers selling cell phones from
their coat pockets, fresh enormous avocados and smiling faces and bootleg
copies of the latest films. In
Zambia, there are people outside the supermarket; in Zambia, when you finish
buying your food, the world is out there waiting for you.
I didn’t freak out in the supermarket. I didn’t do more than roll my eyes at
the lengthy and illegible ingredients list (how many cranberry juices actually
have cranberries in them?), was only slowed down marginally by the inundation
of brands and choices (when did Wheat Thins start carrying so many different flavors? What is that about?), laughed at the
familiar 5 brands of milk and scoffed at the 20 overpriced types of yogurt,
cooed a little at the familiar characters on the breakfast cereals and actually
danced up and down a little in the potato chip aisle, and almost forgot to pay
because I was so busy gaping at the absurd headlines on the tabloids, and all
in all my first trip inside an American grocery store went off without a
hitch. It was actually very nice
to be in this familiar place again, with my familiar poptarts and
Ben&Jerry’s ice cream. And
unlike in my Zambian supermarket, I knew here that I’d be able to find what I
was looking for, that there would be no empty space on the shelves where the
olive oil should be, that there was no need to walk into a grocery store
anxious that something would be missing or out of stock. At least here I knew I’d be able to
find what I was looking for inside the grocery store.
And then I went outside, where in the huge paved arena the
honking chrome reigned supreme, and watched the people rushing between
headlights and yellow lines with their purchases, felt the heavy silence as a
black SUV communed in hand signals with a woman hurrying past with her
daughter, saw the absence of smiling faces and thought of the oversized bananas
and tiny avocados in my bag, looked at the American Supermarket Outdoors and
felt all that was missing.
