The Grocery Store

I once enjoyed going to the grocery store. Trips to the grocery guaranteed I'd be coming home with fun knew things, but there was none of the guilt that comes with paying retail at the mall. That was the old days though, when I regularly shopped at the suburban mega mart with fresh food and empty checkout lines.

Sadly though, my trips to the grocery store are more like high school. I say its like high school because as a hormone filled, pre-teen geek, high school was nothing more than a daily frustration, just as the local super market is.

Here's the rub: there are no gourmet supermarkets in my neighborhood. There are small gourmet groceries, but not the sorts of shops large enough to actually do your grocery shopping at. And there supermarkets, but not the fancy-- and by fancy I mean clean and properly stocked-- that populate the suburbs. Sure, I could take the subway into Manhattan and visit a number of Whole Foods markets, or Chelsea Markets, or Trader Joes, all of which are to the foodie what a college fraternity party on ecstasy is to a sexually frustrated high school geek.

But lets face it, no one wants to ride the subway to do their grocery shopping. That leaves ShopRite with vegetables that look like Bob Dole: old, wrinkled, and limp. Then there is the recently renovated A&P with a gourmet selection of food, though rarely on the same day of the week. Today there was lemon grass, but no ginger. Last week ginger, but no lemon grass. How is one supposed to make a curry in this town anyway?

Oh, and don't let me forget Pathmark, its bordered by project housing on two sides, so its not exactly the gourmet selection I'm hoping for. Actually, whenever I go to Pathmark I'm really only for hoping two things: one, that the store doesn't smell like a dirty diaper and that two, I make it out alive.

I long for simple pleasure of browsing through bins of ripe fruit, refrigerators of soft creamy cheese, aisles filled with foreign delights like HP sauce and Gnutella. Where are my chedder cheese filled, TGI Friday's branded frozen jalapeno poppers A&P? Where are Italian blood oranges, Shoperite? Is it really too much to ask that you have both the fresh food I need and the deep fried frozen treats I crave?

I once enjoyed grocery store shopping. Now though, it has become a chore. But I suppose the lack of Chicken & Broccoli Croissant Pockets and the inability to find imported Parmigiano Reggiano is one sacrifice I have to make to live in an "up and coming" neighborhood.