Is the weekly food shop becoming a lost art?

Is the weekly food shop becoming a lost art?

I bought blueberries yesterday. I had two options, I could either pay 3 euros a pack or I could buy two packs for 5 euros. I went for the deal.

I love blueberries. Not many people in Ireland do, I’ve come to learn. But as an American in the Northeast late summers I ate almost nothing but blueberries some days.  Road side produce stands would sell their over-full fresh picked punnets alongside local yellow and red delicious apples, Bartlett pears, purple fist-sized plums and early pumpkins -a vivid autumn feast for the eyes complete with warm sun, bees buzzing and the low hum of good-

natured people chatting about local gossip: so went our weekly family shop for fruit and veg.

By comparison, yesterday I stood alone in the cold fluorescent produce isle picking through the sad plastic caskets of assorted partially fungal strawberries, blackberries and blueberries. Each clear box of 125 grams sat unfilled to the point of fraud with double the space for the amount of fruit within. Roughly counting the berries rolling about, I estimated there were no more than 50. I began to do math for the everyday in my head; at three euros a box that’s just about six cents per berry-with the two-for deal its five cents.

So I wondered; has the art of shopping faded away? Were our mothers better at it than we are today or do we just remember it that way? Are we busier or just lazier than they were? Is it the shops, the products or is it us?

I’m pretty sure my mother wouldn’t recall shopping with me as salubriously as I recall shopping with her. I’m sure it was, as it is for me today, just a chore to be completed, another errand on the endless rotation of feeding seven people. But, perhaps in vain, I begin a hunt around the aisles of Tescos to explore the theory that the fun of shopping for today’s family has become an unhappy fruitless act.

To begin, for meat and fish and dairy my mother respectively chose the butcher, fishmonger and farm and we made a trip to each separate destination most Saturday mornings. Shopping back then meant asking, tasting, talking, choosing and haggling. I’d be lucky if I spoke to anyone hiding behind my shopping cart.

At the butcher there would be sausage samples sizzling and on offer to the shoppers. Orders were large in those days and retailers appreciated the business providing chatty box boys to move your goods to your car. Today by contrast, I buy fast meat grabbing the least greying pack of chicken in the display case at about 4:30 on a Monday.

In my childhood, anyone in a 40 mile radius got their milk at Upstream Farm. Not only did they make every one of their dairy products, they were produced by the zillions of happy cows munching in their rolling green paddocks and all bottled and packed in glass. Shopping then involved merely refilling your previous weeks order. Empty bottles were returned in the repository. The farmers would wave and you’d wave back. By the time you went inside and bought your cheese and ice cream your milk order would be ready, fresh and waiting for you by the door.

I think my husband picked up some milk last Thursday on his way home from work. I’d have to check on that though.

The shopping ritual didn’t end in the stores. Bags were unpacked by the entire family and Mom would be in the kitchen for a time portioning, wrapping and freezing for the week ahead.  In the summer our hand-picked strawberries were hulled, bagged and stored, fish was cleaned and corn was husked.

I still do get excited by husking corn but now corn on the cob comes half-shucked in plastic, not really a challenge at all.

A lot of comparing the past to the present has to do with memory. And our memories are selective. But how will my daughter remember shopping with her mother? Sure, it is a chore, schlepping store to store but it’s also tomorrow’s memory just like the expensive holidays to the sun, IPad’s, games and bikes we spend so much money on.  But will she remember the IPad or will she be a writer and smile as she picks through the shopping trips of her childhood for an article?

Traditions are funny. They begin out of repetition and necessity and become part of our memories and who we are as people. My childhood was a simple affair. But somehow and sadly I think my mother did do it better than me.