Living With Gramps - Buying Groceries

Buying groceries was a weekly adventure. One never knew what would be out of stock, discontinued, or hidden inside new packaging. My grandfather never understood any of this. “I never had trouble finding it before,” he said. He accepted no substitutions and kept insisting that he needed to come with me to show me where stuff was. “No, I looked very thoroughly and I even asked an employee. They don’t have it anymore,” I replied. I hated shopping with him because he moved so slowly and couldn’t stand for long. There was no way for him to make it all the way to the other end of the store and back without making me extremely nervous that he was about to collapse. “Stores change stuff all the time. It’s been that way my whole life. How do you not know that?” I asked.

Two problematic products were his turkey bologna and his turkey dogs. For weeks at a time, his preferred brand of turkey dogs would be gone, only to reappear the next month. One time, I bought the only package of turkey dogs I could find – a different brand. He refused to eat any of them because they were slightly thicker. “This is too big. I can’t eat that much.”

He was also very particular about his sandwich meat. It had to be round turkey bologna – not square, not beef, not chicken, not unground turkey slices. When the store stopped carrying it (in any brand) for several months, I had to get it from Walmart instead. “I don’t trust Walmart for food. That’s a place where you buy clothes. What do they know about food?”

Vegetable juice was also a problem. One week, the store didn’t have any of the kind we had been drinking. They only had the much more expensive, organic version in smaller bottles. The store employee told me they didn’t make it anymore (it was a store-brand juice). Then, several months later, I saw that the old juice had returned.

Butter was a problem. One day, they were completely out of store-brand butter, and I knew we were almost out at home, so I substituted another. My grandfather could not understand why. “It can’t be. They’ve never been out before!”

There are dozens of kinds of cottage cheese. There is large curd and small curd, 2% fat and 4% fat, plain and fruit-added. After checking very thoroughly for all these variables, I brought home a container of cottage cheese identical in color, design, size, and all product attributes to the one we normally got except that it said “no salt added.” It had never occurred to me to check for this. I had no idea that cheese normally came with salt. We ate the saltless cheese and it was disgusting. The next time I went to the store, I found the two types side-by-side and even mixed together. Yikes! One really has to pay attention.

Buying cheddar is just as risky. One week I encountered two types of cheese side-by-side – same brand, same design, same color (unlike other products by the same brand), and both of them saying “cheddar” in big letters. The only difference I could find was that in very small letters on one end of the packages, one said “extra sharp white” and the other said “natural reduced fat extra sharp cheddar.” Since companies change their packaging all the time, the words meant absolutely nothing to me. I thought to myself: “The product has always been natural and lower fat than some competitor’s cheese; they just want to point this out now for marketing reasons.” Seriously, words in advertising mean nothing. As it turned out, the “reduced fat” cheddar was different than what we have been getting. It wasn’t nearly as tasty and it wouldn’t slice right.

Paper towels were another problem. I had no idea that paper towels came in different sized sheets, nor did I know my grandfather wanted a particular size, nor would I know what the different sizes might be called even if I were aware of the difference. The words “any size” and “full size” are meaningless. Those are relative terms. After checking carefully that I had the right brand, that the towels were white and unprinted, and that they were indeed paper towels and not toilet paper, I bought some “full size” towels when my grandfather wanted “any size.” I never heard the end of it for weeks.

Other times, packaging trips me up. My grandfather wanted peanut butter that didn’t have to be stirred. He wanted a peanut butter spread that was ten percent palm oil. The problem was that this brand had several products with identical containers. Some contained honey. Some were chunky. There were all kinds. Twice I picked up the wrong kind and had to return them. The first time, I can blame it on the row of jars behind not matching the jars in front. The second time, after checking very thoroughly and being aware of the similarities, I can only plead total incompetence.

Some of the trouble is that I can’t always tell the difference between brand, line, product title, and product description. Breakfast cereals of the same brand will have these words in different orders on their labels from one product to the next, making it hard to compare and pick the right one out. No matter how much information I write onto my shopping list, there is always some ambiguity I haven’t anticipated. I even discovered that year that stores could have more than one store brand. For example, Walmart uses both “Great Value” and “Equate.” It’s very confusing.

One time, I was looking for blackberry jam and picked up the only one they had at the time, which was labelled “no sugar.” Since blackberries contain natural sugar, it was obvious to me that this meant there was no sugar added. That was okay with me; I like natural blackberries right off the bush. What never occurred to me to check for was the addition of artificial sweeteners, of which there were many. Yuck! Why does the labelling not make this clear? Why do I have to go hunting through the ingredients list? What is one to do when a product contains a lesser-known ingredient I’ve never seen before?

Finally, there was the epic quest for elderberry jam. When my grandfather asked me to pick up some, I had no doubt I could find it. I expected all the major fruits to be represented: strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, grape, apple, orange (in marmalade form), elderberry, and boysenberry. I also thought there would be others – exotic specialty flavors and novelties.

I was half right. After carefully searching the jelly aisle, novelty aisle, and “ethnic” aisle, I was shocked that the grocery store carried no jellies, jams, preserves, marmalades, or spreads of any kind containing elderberry. I was also shocked that they had apple butter, but no apple jelly, the latter being one of my childhood favorites. They also had no purely blueberry products – only blueberry-lemon.

This is what I did find: Grape, strawberry, rhubarb-strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, orange, apple (butter), pear, fig, cherry, pineapple, boysenberry, apricot, plum, lemon, blueberry-lemon, guava, mango, hot pepper, hot pepper and mango, mint, lime, ginger, blackcurrant, and several mixes of redcurrants, cranberries, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries.

The next week, I visited a local independent store with greater variety. In addition to many of the same flavors listed above, they had blueberry jelly and apple jelly. However, there was still no elderberry.

This is what I did find: Apple, blueberry, sour cherry, black cherry, peach, strawberry-apple-rhubarb, orange-cranberry, pomegranate, lingonberry, fig-ginger, raspberry-peach-champagne, pumpkin, tomatoe, garlic-onion, and maple-bacon-onion.

What kind of place has maple-bacon-onion jelly, but no elderberry??????? It’s a harsh, unforgiving world out there.