Yard Fitness commerical
(c/o D. Ryan)
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Something about Grocery Stores (Here vs. There)
Several years ago I lived in Cambridge, England as part of a college exchange program. More than the history and culture of my surroundings, I was drawn in by the contents of the local grocery stores. I was amazed at the options of flavors available to me that I had spent 20 years unaware of. Apparently there are fruits called currant and they come in red and black. To this day I have no idea what they are, but they make for a tasty candy flavor. There was also a grapefruit flavored soda called Lilt that I enjoyed. In retrospect it tasted horrible, but at the time it was a soda flavor I had yet to experience and that was good enough for me. I live in Spain now and I am just as intrigued by the supermarkets as I was then. Having had worked in a grocery for 4 years from the age of 14 on, there is a certain familiarity and comfort to the structure and organization of a grocery store. There is also something to be said for culturally reading a country by the products on the shelves.
I drink a lot of milk, but I am particular to what kind of milk I will drink. I prefer it to be fresh and in the neighborhood of 1%-2%. In Spain fresh milk can be a chore to come by. I have so far found only two supermarkets that carry it (Consum and Carrefour). The choices available to me are 2% and whole, yet neither of these is kept on the shelves in abundance leaving me with milk every other time I go to the store. When this happens my other option is milk in a box. This is “milk” that is capable of sitting on a shelf unopened for months, quite possibly for years. It has a distinctive buttery taste and it is thinner than milk should be (skim milk, take notice). When I had first moved to Spain, before I discovered that fresh milk was available, I had quit drinking it because I couldn’t bring myself around to drinking aged, warm boxed milk. I did give it a fair chance, it was necessary for my cereal. What I would do is try to eat my cereal without ever actually letting the spoon or the milk touch the tip of my tongue. I would do all the necessary chewing and salival break down processing on the back of my tongue where I could only catch a hint of the sabor. After a while this got to be difficult and ridiculous, so I gave up cereal for toast. It was to my delight when I discovered fresh milk and was able to bring cereal back into my morning routine. This of course brought me to my next dilemma, variety.
I could easily get a different type of cereal every time I go to the grocery store and not repeat myself for a year. To walk down the cereal aisle of Hy-Vee or Cub Foods is a testament to the creative genius of man. There are chocolate and strawberry flavored cereals. There are cereals with chunks of chocolate or strawberries in them. Peanut butter, honey, apple, blueberry, cinnamon, chocolate chip cookies and yogurt all have their own cereals. From Mr. J.H. Kellogg to Mr. C. Crunch cereal has been on the cutting edge of just how far Americans are willing to go in the quest for variety. We will eat cereal that tastes like cinnamon toast. We will eat cereal that comes from invented fruit (the crunchberry). Yet, we do have our limits. For instance we will not eat orange juice flavored cereal (OJ Crunch and Orange Blossom Cereal). Nor will we eat ice-cream flavored cereal (Ice Cream Jones). In Spain, I have found is not nearly so adventurous. Variety for me there means one month I eat Special K from the white box and the next month I eat Special K from the red box.
Variety, however, may have gotten out of hand in the United States. Once upon a time flavors were familiar. My favorite as a child was always cherry and cherry was always red. In my teen years cherry was overtaken by grape in the Great Taste Bud Wars and grape was purple. The surprise victor in the end was lime, much to the chagrin of my former self for whom anything green went straight to the garbage or the dog. Color/flavor identification however seems to be a thing of the past, firmly placed in the ground by the likes of Gatorade (purple = Riptide Rush???) and other assorted sports drinks. In Spain, as I have opined before (“Lamentation of the Peanut Butter Kit Kat”, September 9, 2006), the only choice of flavors are generally lemon or orange (this includes Gatorade).
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser goes into detail about the process of creating artificial flavors and the fact that cherry flavored anything has nothing to do with anything cherry related. Tastes and smells are all manufactured in a factory in New Jersey reminiscent of the drop off point from Being John Malkovich’s brain (I don’t remember if that is referenced in Schlosser’s book or if that was just the image that came into my head when I read it). The fact that they have limited their artificial flavor chemical intake to only those chemicals used in lemon and orange might have something to do with the fact that the life expectancy of the average Spaniard is 2.2 years greater than the average American.
I have come to terms with the simplicity of grocery shopping in Spain. What was at one time a journey has since become run-through. I will admit to boredom with certain items, but this isn’t always a bad thing. I rarely drink soda anymore. It has been replaced by soda water with a lime. This wasn’t a health conscious decision; I had simply gotten bored with Coke or Fanta and wanted something different. By the same token the colorful double stuffed Oreo cookies are no longer available to me. They have been replaced by packets of four single stuffed. Where at one time I could unconsciously gorge myself on an unlimited number of cookies and a large glass of milk has now been restricted to four and Oreos lack in interior sugary white stuff, they make up for in price. They aren’t cheap in the States, but they are expensive here. It’s easier to just forgo the cookie in general.
Opportunities abound in the American supermarket. Surrounded by choices, varieties and flavors one is required to be an active participant in the shopping experience, if only to be sure that the correct items are being placed in the cart. I am generalizing here, but there is the occasional Spanish kid who believes that he will grow up to be a soccer star. But this is few and far between compared to the current generation of “Pimp My Ride”, film my 16th birthday party, reality TV whoring American youth. I see this in my day to day interaction with Spanish high school students as I saw this a few years ago in my day-to-day interaction with American high school students. I see this when I watch Spanish television which is content to talk about the stars and less concerned about being one of them. I see this in the grocery stores where the flavors and smells remain familiar; yellow means lemon and orange means orange. There is no room for red or purple, especially if it is masking as something that it is not.
http://www.lavasurfer.com/cereal-guide.html
I drink a lot of milk, but I am particular to what kind of milk I will drink. I prefer it to be fresh and in the neighborhood of 1%-2%. In Spain fresh milk can be a chore to come by. I have so far found only two supermarkets that carry it (Consum and Carrefour). The choices available to me are 2% and whole, yet neither of these is kept on the shelves in abundance leaving me with milk every other time I go to the store. When this happens my other option is milk in a box. This is “milk” that is capable of sitting on a shelf unopened for months, quite possibly for years. It has a distinctive buttery taste and it is thinner than milk should be (skim milk, take notice). When I had first moved to Spain, before I discovered that fresh milk was available, I had quit drinking it because I couldn’t bring myself around to drinking aged, warm boxed milk. I did give it a fair chance, it was necessary for my cereal. What I would do is try to eat my cereal without ever actually letting the spoon or the milk touch the tip of my tongue. I would do all the necessary chewing and salival break down processing on the back of my tongue where I could only catch a hint of the sabor. After a while this got to be difficult and ridiculous, so I gave up cereal for toast. It was to my delight when I discovered fresh milk and was able to bring cereal back into my morning routine. This of course brought me to my next dilemma, variety.
I could easily get a different type of cereal every time I go to the grocery store and not repeat myself for a year. To walk down the cereal aisle of Hy-Vee or Cub Foods is a testament to the creative genius of man. There are chocolate and strawberry flavored cereals. There are cereals with chunks of chocolate or strawberries in them. Peanut butter, honey, apple, blueberry, cinnamon, chocolate chip cookies and yogurt all have their own cereals. From Mr. J.H. Kellogg to Mr. C. Crunch cereal has been on the cutting edge of just how far Americans are willing to go in the quest for variety. We will eat cereal that tastes like cinnamon toast. We will eat cereal that comes from invented fruit (the crunchberry). Yet, we do have our limits. For instance we will not eat orange juice flavored cereal (OJ Crunch and Orange Blossom Cereal). Nor will we eat ice-cream flavored cereal (Ice Cream Jones). In Spain, I have found is not nearly so adventurous. Variety for me there means one month I eat Special K from the white box and the next month I eat Special K from the red box.
Variety, however, may have gotten out of hand in the United States. Once upon a time flavors were familiar. My favorite as a child was always cherry and cherry was always red. In my teen years cherry was overtaken by grape in the Great Taste Bud Wars and grape was purple. The surprise victor in the end was lime, much to the chagrin of my former self for whom anything green went straight to the garbage or the dog. Color/flavor identification however seems to be a thing of the past, firmly placed in the ground by the likes of Gatorade (purple = Riptide Rush???) and other assorted sports drinks. In Spain, as I have opined before (“Lamentation of the Peanut Butter Kit Kat”, September 9, 2006), the only choice of flavors are generally lemon or orange (this includes Gatorade).
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser goes into detail about the process of creating artificial flavors and the fact that cherry flavored anything has nothing to do with anything cherry related. Tastes and smells are all manufactured in a factory in New Jersey reminiscent of the drop off point from Being John Malkovich’s brain (I don’t remember if that is referenced in Schlosser’s book or if that was just the image that came into my head when I read it). The fact that they have limited their artificial flavor chemical intake to only those chemicals used in lemon and orange might have something to do with the fact that the life expectancy of the average Spaniard is 2.2 years greater than the average American.
I have come to terms with the simplicity of grocery shopping in Spain. What was at one time a journey has since become run-through. I will admit to boredom with certain items, but this isn’t always a bad thing. I rarely drink soda anymore. It has been replaced by soda water with a lime. This wasn’t a health conscious decision; I had simply gotten bored with Coke or Fanta and wanted something different. By the same token the colorful double stuffed Oreo cookies are no longer available to me. They have been replaced by packets of four single stuffed. Where at one time I could unconsciously gorge myself on an unlimited number of cookies and a large glass of milk has now been restricted to four and Oreos lack in interior sugary white stuff, they make up for in price. They aren’t cheap in the States, but they are expensive here. It’s easier to just forgo the cookie in general.
Opportunities abound in the American supermarket. Surrounded by choices, varieties and flavors one is required to be an active participant in the shopping experience, if only to be sure that the correct items are being placed in the cart. I am generalizing here, but there is the occasional Spanish kid who believes that he will grow up to be a soccer star. But this is few and far between compared to the current generation of “Pimp My Ride”, film my 16th birthday party, reality TV whoring American youth. I see this in my day to day interaction with Spanish high school students as I saw this a few years ago in my day-to-day interaction with American high school students. I see this when I watch Spanish television which is content to talk about the stars and less concerned about being one of them. I see this in the grocery stores where the flavors and smells remain familiar; yellow means lemon and orange means orange. There is no room for red or purple, especially if it is masking as something that it is not.
http://www.lavasurfer.com/cereal-guide.html
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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