An Omnivore’s Odyssey
TWO CENTS | NOV 20, 2020
An Omnivore’s Odyssey
How a gourmet grocery store inspired familial connection through food.
I come from a long line of supermarket junkies. Having inherited some matrilineal grocery gene via X chromosome, I get a dopamine rush at the suctioning glide of the automatic glass doors as I clutch my reusable bags and step across the supermarket threshold. Growing up, my mom and I sailed through the aisles, connecting over a shared love of free food samples, half-price items in the WooHoo! clearance section, and aspirational meal prep. More than an errand to purchase pantry staples, for the two of us, a trip to the grocery store was an escape from our boring Indiana world, an Omnivore’s Odyssey.
For my mom’s parents in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the grocery store of choice was Hy-Vee. When my family visited, a desperate need to escape the house combined with the expression of love through food led my mom and grandma to return to Hy-Vee (with me in tow) up to four (4!) times a day to acquire a forgotten ingredient for Christmas cookies or more of the sticky caramel pecan rolls that kept mysteriously disappearing. “Did someone say we needed more orange juice concentrate in case we exhaust the stockpile in the freezer? I’ll go grab some!” When restless energy mounted and we couldn’t twiddle our thumbs for one second longer, we returned to Hy-Vee. It was home base.
For me, the grocery store became not just a haven, but a Realm of Infinite Possibility—a space where familial connection (or avoiding it) is easier, where culinary creativity is unlimited, and where the pre-pandemic food samples are free flowing.
After the Christmas festivities, we’d drive back to Bloomington, Indiana, and to our hometown Kroger. Before my Kroger had even finished outgassing its post-renovation fumes, the students of my Midwestern high school had dubbed it “Krogucci.” And indeed, this particular Kroger should have the cans of every other national grocery chain quaking on their shelves. Krogucci is the Mall of America of grocery stores. Grocerytown, USA. Encasing in cellophane all that is sensational about food shopping, it inspires dinner more than any greasy Taste of Home casserole recipe could. Krogucci’s mazelike aisles display all the gourmet and house-brand foods your palate desires, plus four salad bar stations, with rotating delicacies from curried chickpea supergrain medley to sundried tomato pesto cavatappi. Krogucci contains an entire liquor store in a cavernous room past checkout, a bistro and a smoothie bar, and—my personal favorite stop—a cheese counter staffed full time by a cheesemonger. Her name is Liz.
My mom knows Liz personally, as she does most of the Kroger staff, their smiles sunny and their eagerness to help disarmingly genuine. Liz has sold our family cheese by the display wagon-load, and in turn, we’ve consumed literally pounds of aged gouda and espresso asiago from her sample cart. By we, I refer exclusively to my mom and me. No one else in our family has any interest in grocery shopping. I’ve never seen my dad cook anything more ambitious than a Bisquick waffle, and my sister was extremely picky and uninterested in food for most of her life. For anyone else in my family, grocery shopping was a chore—and certainly not an Odyssey.
In my middle and high school angst, when I was positive that no one in my house could possibly understand me, expeditions outside my home briefly alleviated my age-mandated moodiness. During these years, grocery shopping was a shared ritual for my mom and me. It required minimal verbal communication (not our strong suit) and we conversed instead in “Yums!” and grins of mutual delight as we bonded over our shared appreciation for food in neutral territory. For me, Kroger represented the potential to cook, perhaps become, anything. “Let’s pick out a recipe,” my mom would say, and I’d voraciously leaf through the gleaming new Martha Stewart Living and envision cooking fantasies far beyond Martha’s overstyled shots of domestic bliss. Then we’d head to Kroger, where the sliding doors opened like curtains onto fluorescent possibility.
During high school, my expanding sense of possibility included making every ingredient in those recipes from scratch. If a recipe called for ricotta, it would be homemade. To the family’s quiet dismay, I heated and curdled milk on the stovetop, then strained it through layers of cheesecloth, nauseating anyone who opened the fridge to find a pile of curds slumped over a jar, leeching cloudy whey, drip by drip. One entire July, I ate toast smothered in soft cheese, topped with cherry tomatoes, balsamic, and fresh cracked pepper. My mom, who dutifully lugged home gallons of whole milk for this very purpose, dubbed these months of relentless cheese production “Ricotta Summer.”
Kroger had everything we could wish for, from organic whole milk to several fridge doors-full of alternative milks. Wending our way through culinary neighborhoods, we nibbled gourmet samples prepared just for us: Bolognese over melting potatoes or truffled cheddar on a multigrain crisp swooped with berry compote. We doubled back for the best offerings, shameless and hungry for seconds. “Oh, you again?” the cheery Kroger staff would singsong as we returned for yet another pan-fried dumpling dressed up as amuse-bouche. We feasted on bite-sized morsels, our evening tapas. It was “girl food,” we joked giddily, sated and sympatico after our loops around the store.
There was comfort in the inevitable return to the grocery store and the periodic rhythm it imposed on our life. The bright lights and freshly waxed floors offered fleeting respite from the challenges of Midwestern suburbia, which we traded for a shopping cart at the front of the store. My mom and I were both the best versions of ourselves there, and we strolled through the store with purpose but not urgency. This was precious time, this homecoming of an errand, where so much was possible, at least in the world of food. As we made plans for the night’s meal, I felt myself soften, and then bloom with the culinary possibilities at my fingertips, and the appetizing idea that there was more to the world than my bland slice of Indiana.
As the two of us ambled through Kroger, we collected eggs and hummus, good vibes and mutual solidarity. We visited Liz. We checked the marked down WooHoo! section and surreptitiously sampled the odd olive off the antipasti bar. We made the rounds and ticked off the items, the metal cart brimming with Kroger’s cornucopia, a new citrus zester (“On sale!”), and the temporary solace we had found inside.
Then, we set out to make dinner, our car trunk full of food, our ribs with double-cream brie, our hearts with the warming certainty that Kroger would welcome us back.
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Kate Raphael is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previous essays have appeared in Bon Appetit and the Tracksmith Journal.
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