Supermarket Sweep

The plan was to leave for McCall sometime in the afternoon on Sunday- our first full day back in the states. We spent six days in the Western Idaho resort town, the first three with my parents and siblings in the vacation home of a family friend and the remaining three with Sami's folks. Before we left, I accompanied my mom to Red Apple, her grocer of choice in Ontario, Oregon.

While this near-weekly ritual can hardly be considered my favorite activity, I jumped at the opportunity to hunt for ingredients impossible to find at my current residence. Before we left, I took great care in creating a three day meal plan centered around the types of cuisine I had been hankering about the past year. Foods I used to take for granted like beef tacos, barbecued chicken and pasta. Even something like a simple sandwich with whole wheat bread isn't easy to come by in the land of rice, soup and kimchi.

As I scattered about the store searching for hidden treasures like a wonky-legged puppy, my mom plodded behind methodically, clutching my wish list in one hand and the cart handle in the other. I marveled at how she seemingly knew every employee and fellow employee in the store. After over twenty years teaching at the middle school across the street, she inevitably ran into former students stocking shelves and slicing deli meat. In one breath she would inquire about a child or sibling, and in the next ask which watermelons had been sitting the longest.

I strolled through the extra wide aisles designed for extra wide asses and took note of how few patrons roamed along side me. If Lotte Mart, the supermarket we frequent back home, is a Tokyo subway, the shopping cart I held in my hand at Red Apple was a horse and buggy. Just then mom caught up from behind me.

"Jeez, it's busy today," she said without a hint of sarcasm.

In addition to being considerably more spacious, the aisles at Red Apple were loaded with food items I forgot existed. The produce aisle was considerably bigger and contained a near endless cornucopia of seasonal (and non-seasonal) fruits and vegetables that cannot be found at any time in Korea. The cereal aisle completely dwarfed ours back at home even though our city is 30 times more populated.

The biggest difference was the dairy section- a back wall lined with milk jugs lit up like large, florescent bulbs, and tubs and tubs of butter, yogurt and cottage cheese. Back in Korea you will find a single file line of five or six cartons of milk- never more than 100ml. You might be able to find a stick of butter if you ask, but it will cost you.

This may not be such a bad thing. I am convinced that the reason I have been able to lose weight in Korea is because I have removed nearly all dairy from my diet. I fell off the wagon in the states and came back weighing six and a half extra pounds heavier. By the end I was having trouble breathing while laboring around with a swollen belly- praying for the day I would finally give birth to my cheese baby.

I also took note of what Red Apple didn't have. There were no aisles dedicated solely to spicy ramen, giant packages of dried and salted seaweed, or (saddest of all) no young girls in short shorts hawking products in a language I don't understand. When I asked the woman behind the seafood counter (unattractive, fully clothed) if they have whole shrimp with the heads on she gave me the same look she would have made immediately after learning her daughter was doing Osama Bin Laden.

"Why would you want the heads on?" she snarked.

"Because I like to suck out the brains. It's the best part."

"Eeew. No, we don't have whole shrimp. We don't get them whole and no where else around here does."

Next she pointed me to an area of the store that had bags of large frozen shrimp, in a typically American attempt to substitute size for flavor. I surveyed the flash frozen crustaceans and walked on.

Maybe it is better when no one understands me.