2008 Woodie Awards
What's the deal with...Hidden grocery store delights
Nathanial Garrod
Issue date: 2/26/08 Section: Features
For many people, moving into their college dorm is their first foray into the real world. It's not like this for me - I lived in a boarding school environment so I had to grow up fast.
When watching my friends deal with things like grocery shopping on their own, or buying house cleaning supplies, I am reminded of the excitement of these matters that I now take for granted.
For example, we have the grocery store. During one of my midnight grocery shopping trips with my roommate (only in college would anyone go grocery shopping at midnight, right?) I realized something. One can, potentially, learn almost anything at the grocery store.
In order to prove this theory, I went to our friendly local Safeway (which I have started to refer to as Jewel because my roommate, who is from Chicago, has gotten this name stuck in my head) with a friend one afternoon. The trip definitely rates highly on most interesting grocery store trips.
We got there and started in the produce section. It seemed fitting. Most people I know conclude their grocery store trips in the produce section. We quickly realized that neither of us knew how to tell if radishes were ripe. I asked the produce worker. He said that one needs to look for a deep, dark red color, and firm greens. There are occasional splits in the radishes. This is because during transportation, the radishes are packed in ice.
A few isles down, I found a box of Macaroni and Cheese that had exciting facts on it. For example, did you know that dinosaurs first appeared 225 million years ago? I did.
My personal favorite fact, next to the dinosaurs, was found on the back of a can of Cambells Spaghetti-O's. They were Dora the Explorer Spaghetti-O's, and you could learn how to count to six in both English and Spanish on the back of the can.
Next on our academic grocery trip was Log Cabin Syrup. When I saw the bottle I remembered a random tidbit that I once picked up somewhere. The man who invented the brand (as later research turned up, he was a Minnesotan grocer named Patrick Towle) decided to name it in honor of his hero, Abraham Lincoln.
When watching my friends deal with things like grocery shopping on their own, or buying house cleaning supplies, I am reminded of the excitement of these matters that I now take for granted.
For example, we have the grocery store. During one of my midnight grocery shopping trips with my roommate (only in college would anyone go grocery shopping at midnight, right?) I realized something. One can, potentially, learn almost anything at the grocery store.
In order to prove this theory, I went to our friendly local Safeway (which I have started to refer to as Jewel because my roommate, who is from Chicago, has gotten this name stuck in my head) with a friend one afternoon. The trip definitely rates highly on most interesting grocery store trips.
We got there and started in the produce section. It seemed fitting. Most people I know conclude their grocery store trips in the produce section. We quickly realized that neither of us knew how to tell if radishes were ripe. I asked the produce worker. He said that one needs to look for a deep, dark red color, and firm greens. There are occasional splits in the radishes. This is because during transportation, the radishes are packed in ice.
A few isles down, I found a box of Macaroni and Cheese that had exciting facts on it. For example, did you know that dinosaurs first appeared 225 million years ago? I did.
My personal favorite fact, next to the dinosaurs, was found on the back of a can of Cambells Spaghetti-O's. They were Dora the Explorer Spaghetti-O's, and you could learn how to count to six in both English and Spanish on the back of the can.
Next on our academic grocery trip was Log Cabin Syrup. When I saw the bottle I remembered a random tidbit that I once picked up somewhere. The man who invented the brand (as later research turned up, he was a Minnesotan grocer named Patrick Towle) decided to name it in honor of his hero, Abraham Lincoln.