ATTENTION, SHOPPERS!

I will claim my position as a master at grocery shopping. My edge comes from my mother's example. She was a first-generation American of Russian and Polish parents. She was born into poverty nine years before the onset of The Great Depression. As a pre-adolescent, she had an after-school job as a housekeeper, cook and baby-sitter for middle-class women in her city. These women taught my mother the deep cruelty of social and economic class. 

My mother was thirty when I was born. She managed to work, keep house and provide an excellent diet for our extended family of six. She was an exceptional woman in her time. Her peers were in awe of her determination, energy and frankness. My mother was tri-lingual. And, growing up in a densely populated city of many ethnic groups had made her very savvy. 

Our proletarian city in the 1950's had no vast supermarkets or big-box stores. The forty thousand inhabitants, packed into one square mile, were served by butchers, bakers, haberdashers and dime stores. Milkmen delivered dairy goods to our homes. Milk and cream were delivered in recycled bottles. Cheeses were cut to order and delivered in waxed brown paper. Our composting food waste was collected twice a week from in-ground pails in our yards by local pig farmers. Our barrels were picked weekly by the local rag-and-bone men, filthy bearded trolls, who trudged up and down our streets pulling their contrived handcarts, some with old car wheels and others with bicycle wheels. My favorite was a Russian Jewish immigrant who lived to be over 100. When he died, his elderly daughter found over a million dollars in bills in his mattress, which was on the floor of the shed he called home for many decades.

Yes, you younger Americans have lost a great deal to modern life. You have lost the real personal factor which once inhabited every part of the social environment. The virtual worlds of Twiitter, You Tube and Facebook are pale shadows of the richness of an extinct urban life. You have been convinced that the old ways were cumbersome, inconvenient and unsophisticated. This is what corporations sell to indoctrinate you be a faceless consumers in an overpopulated, herded world: To line up in the cold for the newest overpriced hypnotic gadget.

Not I. As I said, I was trained by a master shopper. My mother took me with her on Fridays when she did much of her week's food shopping. It was her day to take our black 1950 Plymouth tooling through the tight streets of our congested downtown. She started with dry goods at the local market. We went to the dime store for cookies and candy for my father's sweet tooth. The dime store sold these items in open bulk bins from which they were plucked with naked fingers, tossed into paper bags and weighed in an old hanging scale at the cashier counter. 

From the dime store, we went to the green grocer for fruits and vegetables. The proprietor was a tanned Sicilian immigrant. He didn't much care for assertive women and withdrew from dealing with my mother. His wife or one of his several sons were usually glad to listen to her specifications and comply with a sardonic grin. I can still hear the sound of their luscious summer peaches dropping into a paper bag amid non-stop Italian banter between the brothers and their parents.

The star of Friday's shopping route was Benny the Butcher. No, that wasn't a criminal moniker. His name was Benny, and he was the city's kosher butcher. (For cold cuts and pork, my mother went to the Italian butcher.) Benny's shop reeked of death. Benny's mouth always sported a fuming cigar. He wore a full apron over a dress shirt and bow tie. The apron was always an abstract canvas of blood and guts. He had known my mother as a little girl. When she entered the shop, his bulging eyes rolled up into his bushy eyebrows. 

"Mrs. Creeden!" Benny's greeting was a welcome and a challenge. My mother put Benny through his paces. "That one! Don't try to unload your old chops on me!" Benny always complied with a grumble. The other customers would withdraw a bit from the counter. It was the weekly show, starring my mother and Benny. There was usually a fair share of laughter from the audience. But my mother got the best, and we ate like aristocrats.

Today's shopping is more centralized. I use two grocery stores and shop weekly from a list, a hand-written list from a small notepad I keep in my kitchen. I won't divulge the store names here. But one is a boutique supermarket with good imports at reasonable prices. The other is an all-American supermarket chain store. I loathe warehouse stores. To me, they represent all the evils of overpopulation and over-consumption. 

Since I moved in May, I have had to shop at different versions of my usual chains. This has rankled me at times. The previous boutique store had some staff I had known for seven years. It wasn't just weekly shopping there. It was also checking in with people I liked. It was reminiscent of my childhood shopping excursions, though lacking my mother's contentious approach and the mocking banter that ensued in response to it. The change in supermarkets was less jarring. After all, one thing corporate merchandising does well is boring predictability.

I am an observer of people by nature and by habit. As a registered nurse for two decades, I developed useful diagnostic and prognostic skills. Shopping with these skills is entertaining and frustrating. The person who rushes to cut me off to the tomatoes, squeezes them and buys none, for example. The person who does this with nearly every loose piece of fruit and buys none. Sexual frustration? Obsessive compulsive behavior? Both?

My favorite interactions of late have been at the boutique market where I buy my large avocados every week. This wonderful fruit is the test of a shopper's knowledge about food preparation. And, I will tell you, the state of that knowledge in the general public, as I observe it, is pretty dismal. There are the Asian buyers who try to squeeze every avocado in the pile and the up-tight WASP buyer whose slight pinch is accompanied by a wrinkling of the nose. There is the youthful buyer who stares at the pile of avocados as if he is wondering what it might be if it were wrapped in plastic with a brand name on it. 

Every now and then I like to intervene. "Squeezing them doesn't magically ripen them," I will say with a forced smile. Some of the squeezers run away immediately, as though they had been caught molesting a small child. However, some do engage. A common reply is, "I know, it's a bad habit." If someone engages, I usually tell them that they should buy a few hard green avocados and place them on a sunny counter at home for a few days. Then they can refrigerate them for up to a week, once they are ripened. Similar advice is useful in the tomato aisle. I also explain that all this squeezing is damaging our supply. Fruit often begins to rot where it has been bruised by squeezing fingers or pierced by lacquered nails. 

Have I been greeted with negativity in response? Never. In fact, I have been thanked for the advice generally. While I sometimes enjoy these encounters, I am also saddened by them. The average shopper for food in my youth knew better. The average shopper, almost exclusively female, was so much wiser than the average and wealthier shopper I now encounter. And don't even get me started about what I think when I occasionally go to Whole Foods.