Groceries!

Wednesday is the first day in a long time I get to go grocery shopping. The day has finally come when all the roommates are tired of not having any food and having to resort to takeout, or in my case, Spam. Grocery shopping is a science for us. We have a routine—a concrete list—and even though it happens so rarely we’ve been doing it for two years and it runs like a well oiled machine. It works better in small groups, so two of us go—me, and my roommate Scott.

Our grocery store of choice is Market Basket. It is cheaper than a Stop and Shop and it is close by. When we enter Market Basket I feel like a runner on the starting block. We have no reason to rush, it just feels like the quicker we get in and out the less money we are likely to spend. That is another reason we only shop in twos or threes. The more people in the store, the people wandering around and trying to buy pointless and expensive snacks.

I man the cart, and Scott and I start on the right hand side of Market Basket, near the dairy products. We get butter, whipped cream (I like it on waffles), eggs, bacon, milk, the Turkey Hill iced teas (one of the few non-Market Basket brands we splurge on), and cheese. Shredded cheese, bricks of cheese, canned cheese—cheese is a popular item on the list. At the first corner we split. Scott goes to the deli to get a pound of roast beef and a pound of turkey, as well as some of those deli rolls that sit on the racks in front of the meats. We all like cold cut sandwiches, and the deli meats are some of the fastest things to go when we return from shopping.

Now that I am on my own I can basically get half the things on the list without looking. I get bottles of water, tortilla chips, those boxes of taco shells and seasoning and sauce, more drinks, frozen foods like waffles and those little breakfast sausages, frozen meats—usually just chicken breast or pork chops, as meats raise the price quite a bit—and a couple cans of Spam to replenish my stock. By the time I make it down the central isles and back to the deli, Scott has the meats and the rolls. Together we do produce, and get lettuce and tomatoes, and if a sale item catches my eye sometimes I buy a large bag of green beans, or a bag of actual cherries, the ones with the seeds and the stems. Shopping for natural foods makes me feel healthy, even though the feeling leaves after I exit the store and return to my apartment, only to see my healthy purchases relegated to the back of the fridge, where even I have a hard time bringing myself to eat them.

Our cart full of a mishmash of greens and packaged foods, with the breads piled high on top so not to get squished, Scott and I check out. This is the scary part, and we always try to predict how much it will cost. It usually falls between one hundred and one hundred and twenty five dollars, which is our goal. If splitting groceries evenly five ways reduces the price to around twenty dollars a person, we are happy. This batch costs one hundred and twenty dollars. Pleased with ourselves, we return home, finally able to look forward to an actual meal.