The changing world of groceries

The New York Times published an article today (link) looking at three mega-grocery stores – H Mart, Patel Brothers, and 99 Ranch. These are three chains that started as grocery stores focused on an Asian market that grew into multi-store behemoths. There are four H-Marts fairly close to my kitchen (out of a total of 96 stores in the northeast) and all four as enormous – as big as any Wegman’s and much larger than any Acme, Whole Foods, Price Rite, Trader Joe’s, Aldi, or Giant. H-Mart’s sales are $2 billion.  I can’t personally speak to Patel Brothers or 99 Ranch, but you get the idea.

The Times explored how these stores can no longer be considered ethnic food stores but their size, selection, and mix of Asian and non-Asian customers is in the process of changing the face of grocery shopping. While I don’t disagree, I think grocery shopping has already irrevocably changed and isn’t any where close to the category’s stability in the 1960s.  H-Mart and at the rest are one more (admittedly major) addition to an already dynamic situation.

For my mother, grocery shopping meant going to the Star Market (a regional New England chain) the next town over on Thursdays with my grandmother. She only shopped on Thursdays and would almost never go food shopping on any other day. Of course that was in the days that milk was delivered, but meat, fruits, vegetables, bread, and so on were all purchased on Thursday. I later found out that Thursday was the day because, as good Catholics, we ate fish on Fridays and you can’t buy fish too far in advance of the day you plan on serving it.

She would load up with a week’s worth of packaged bread, cellophane wrapped lettuce and tomatoes, cans of Chef Boyardee spaghetti in tomato sauce, frozen TV dinners, some fresh meat, deli meat for lunches, ice cream, frozen orange juice, and so on and so on (let’s not forget the carton of cigarettes). It would take close to an hour to unpack everything when she got home, but then that was it – and that ritual never changed. A Stop & Shop (another regional New England chain) that was larger than the Star Market in our own town but that wouldn’t change my mother’s Thursday trip to the Star Market.

Now let’s fast forward about 60 years to today. My true love and I have just returned from a vacation in Barcelona and I’m going to cook an octopus in a clay pot to remind us of the visit. Where will this meal come from? Let’s start with the octopus itself. This 2 kg octopus comes from a retail storefront of a major seafood distributor in the food distribution district of Philadelphia (Giuseppe’s Market at Samuels Seafood). We could have gotten an octopus closer to home but we can’t count on Whole Foods being in stock with whole octopus and the fishmonger in the Italian Market (a hybrid of open-air stalls and stores lining 6-7 blocks of 9th Street in Philly) doesn’t carry anything smaller than 4 kg. I’ll also stop at Charlie’s Produce in the Italian Market for Spanish onions (Vidalias are become so hip that you can’t always count on getting plain Spanish onions, but we soldier on), herbs (a large handful for $3 compared to three sprigs for $3 at Acme and Whole Foods), carrots, and a cucumber for the salad. While we’re here, I’ll also drop into Claudio’s, an Italian specialty store, for olives and olive oil.

Before heading home, though, I need to drop in at Whole Foods for lettuce and tomatoes. The lettuce and tomatoes in the Italian Market can be OK but Whole Foods has an army of farmers exploring the cutting edge of agricultural production and it shows up most clearly in lettuces and tomatoes. It used to be taken for granted that you can’t get good tomatoes out of season and I’ll give you – nothing beats a New Jersey tomato in August. Even today, beefsteak and Roma tomatoes can be terrible in the winter and spring. On the other hand, there is some inspirational wizardry afoot that keeps new varieties of cherry tomatoes delicious all year round. Hothouse lettuces can be bland, but there are some hydroponic lettuces out there that are changing the stakes for salads.

Almost done. We still need to go to Acme, a traditional Mid-Atlantic grocery store next door to Whole Foods. While Whole Foods has about a half-dozen kinds of plant based milk, they don’t have cashew milk and cashew milk is the favored milk in this household. Finally, I can’t not mention that we always have a salad to follow the main course and we like to include a grain in the salad. Our preferred grain is freekeh, a chewy grain made from green durum wheat. The only place we’ve been able to find it is at Al Rayyam , a halal grocery store on the other side of Philadelphia. That’s also my source for preserved lemons, a source of seasoning I used often.

I acknowledge that I’m exaggerating to make a point. First off, I’m blessed by the sources available to me – sources that may not be available to many. Second, I could streamline this process considerably if I planned differently and was either willing to pay a little more for some things or settle for a little less quality on others. I could also drive to H Mart and get everything I need except the things I picked up from Claudio’s and Al Rayyam.

The point, though, is that for many of us, the opportunities of what kind of food to buy and where to buy it are enormously different than they were when people my age (prime baby boomers) were young. It would never have occurred to my mother to go to seven different stores to assemble the ingredients for one meal, let alone make a special shopping trip of one ingredient. H Mart, Patel Brothers, and 99 Ranch are just more examples how much easier it is to get what we want when we want it.

I’ll post a picture and the recipe for the octopus soon. It came out GREAT.