Food: Grocery Shopping Then and Now

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Grocery Shopping Then and Now
Wednesday, October 26, 2005

By Christina VanGinkel

Grocery shopping has become something of a trial lately, no matter where you live, as a direct result of the many hurricanes that have hit the US coast this year. Figuring out what fruit and vegetable are in not only season, but also what has not been affected by the storms, is one aspect that has arisen. Also finding certain products on the store shelves that we have learned to take for granted is another, as many areas outside of the directly affected areas have had their shipments rerouted to the worst hit areas to make sure that those people living there have the simple basics at hand. Coffee singles for example, the kind that look like tea bags, are not as easy to find in my neighborhood. I am assuming that the reason behind this is simple. If you have no coffee pot, etc., the chance of getting a single cup of coffee made is much greater than finding a place to brew a whole pot.

Prices are also somewhat higher on certain goods, in part due to the rise in gasoline prices to ship the many products to your local store's shelves. This all got me to thinking about how we have all come to take for granted store shelves filled to capacity with every type of food imaginable. The luxury of walking into a grocery store and being able to pick up fresh fruit no matter the current growing season, and several different kinds of the same fruit at that, such as both yellow and white peaches, and more types of apples than I even know the names of, not to mention exotic fruits such as pineapples, coconuts, mangoes, and kiwis, has not always been so, not even for the immediate past. I am what most would refer to as middle aged, and I can clearly recall shopping with my mother and only being able to buy certain fruits at certain times of the year. If a fruit was not in season, we always had the luxury of running down to the basement to see if there were any jars leftover from the previous season's crop that my mother had taken the time to 'put up'. During the holidays, it was such a treat to get an apple and an orange in our stockings, because we did not have them available year round as we do now. The luxury of some of the simplest things was just coming into their own, such as 'frozen' pizzas and other boxed and frozen goods. While the first frozen pizza had come about during the Second World War, it was some time after that before they became a common staple of nearly every teenager's diet.

So if you are one of the many being indirectly affected by the recent tragedies down south, remind yourself that store shelves that are a bit sparse are nothing in comparison to those living in the effected areas, and still far much better than what a typical store's shelves were just a few short decades ago. We thankfully live in a country that has been quick to recover, to the point that many of us will not even notice the small lags in product availability that I have mentioned.

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