Grocery Shopping in a Foreign Land

I’d been to Whole Foods grocery before, of course, having first seen one sprout up  near my college campus back in the early 90s. But I’d never been there with a shopping list like this one.

Jicama

It was gigantic: five typed pages, from legumes to dairy substitutes. And I was on a mission. A month-long cleanse with holistic nutritionist Simla Somturk Wickless and several other woman interested in getting healthy. The goal? To fill my cart with staples that would allow for a week of vitamin-filled, delicious eating…all without subjecting my body to those things that are known to cause food sensitivities, like gluten or dairy. No eggs. No cow’s or soy  milk. No Kellogg’s breakfast cereal.

Before entering the store, I suited up as if getting ready to head into the Artic. Seven fabric grocery bags, purse slung over my body on the diagonal for maximum maneuverability through the Saturday morning crowd, my daughter on my hip till we could locate a cart, and the hefty 5-page, 8.5 x 11 list folded in quarters in my purse.

What came next was an adventure in product-seeking like I never had engaged in before. From brown rice syrup to coconut butter, from grapeseed oil to Bhutanese rice, from nutritional yeast to chlorophyll, I was digging from high to low through the rows and shelves of foreign products. And that was after the 45-minute scavenger hunt through the produce aisles for vegetables I had never heard of or known how to pronounce, like jicama (hih-ka-ma).Then there were the variations on foods I had heard of: not just cabbage but Napa cabbage, not red radishes but daikon radishes, and let’s not forget dinosaur kale.

Garbanzo bean flour? That could wait for next week’s muffin recipe. In the meantime, I needed to stock up on some Tulsi tea.

I’m not going to lie to you. I was exhausted and near penniless after that two-hour shopping trip to stock my cupboard with staples and fill my fridge with fresh produce of every kind (don’t worry, I was sure to recoup the money in all those avoided meals out). But I was on a little high too.

I had tried something different! I was on the path to a way of eating that was totally new to me and incredibly healthy: whole foods. After years of reading magazine articles and listening to talk show health-food experts telling me I needed to spend most of my time at the “edges” of the grocery store rather than the snack-laden, processed food middle aisles, I had done just that!

Would I have the time to wash, chop, saute, and steam all these vegetables once I got home? I had no clue. But I was darn proud of myself and flushed with the excitement of pushing myself to enter into uncharted territory for the sake of my own body and the whole health of my family. I was a woman on a mission…to take care of me.

Related posts:

Let the Cleanse Begin