This Ain't No Stop & Shop... The Real Way to Shop for Food

As I tooled down the aisles of my local Stop & Shop

looking at the floor to ceiling rows of food choices and limp, exhausted fruit, and not being overly inspired by any of them, I drifted off momentarily to another grocery run that I did in a galaxy far far way… in a place called Paris. (Cue the dream sequence music and blurry camera views)

The last time I was in Paris was for my birthday, not this last one, but don’t get me started on that part of the story – no one wants to see a grown woman cry. Anyway, it was a great trip. I went to all my favorite places and saw all my favorite sites on the tourist track but not on the tourist track. Getting fairly close to my last couple of days visiting the city I love.  

I was winding my way street by street up and back from the Seine toward the Tour Eiffel from my hotel in the 5^th arrondissement. It was a soft June day and really is there any place better to be in June? The puffy clouds and slight breeze told me no, there wasn’t. It was then that I came upon Rue Cler in the 7^th conveniently placed halfway between the Tour Eiffel and the Esplanade Des Invalides. It was a market street.

Now everyone who’s read about Europe knows about these markets, but in my many trips there I had never truly bumped into one of them. I wasn’t really looking but it succeeded in ruining me for grocery shopping from that point on. It is basically one block long… probably about the same size as the average American grocery store now that I think about it. But it was gastronomical bliss. I’m not even a foodie. I mean I like eating but it’s not my raison d’etre.  However, if I lived here, maybe I would become one.

Along that one block was the makings of the most incredible picnic I’ve ever had. Literally a moveable feast but probably not the literary one that Hemingway was referring to.

It was the fruit that first caught my attention. Stacked boxes bursting with every kind of fruit you could think of and many that I had no idea what they were. The strawberries in their beautiful open containers. Perfect parcels of juicy red happiness ready to be plucked. Raspberries taste like raspberries. Snozzberries taste like snozzberries… whoops sorry for the Wonka flashback. Onto the shiny (but not too shiny) apples. Flawless pairs. Grape clusters wrapped in paper. And in that instant there went the grocery store produce section.

Then the fromage struck. Pungent and feety and tongue itchingly good. I’ll take that one, and that one, and that one, and hell throw in those two as well. They say that only a small percentage of cheeses are exported to the U.S. and I don’t blame them for hoarding them. The variety and flavor is unmatched and I’d keep it all to myself in my own little cave if I could! I didn’t even have to delete the shrink wrapped cheese case from my grocery store memory… it never found purchase in the first place.

It was about this time that the picnic idea hit… oh yeah baby, let’s keep going.

Hmm, what next? Oh, hey across the street is a butcher… where you find that you find … charcuterie.  Some smoked, cured meat would be just the thing to carry this home. A little bit of ham, salumi, sausage… skip the pate (told you I wasn’t a foodie), and poof! there went the standard deli case.

Then a whiff of something, warm and crusty floated by… baguette anyone? Two of those please… and a pain au chocolate for good measure, just in case I need a snack later. Yeah, right!

Two last stops left to make for the perfect pic-i-nic basket, BooBoo! A smidge of dark chocolate from madame chocolatier and then for une bouteille vin rouge to wash it all down with… cork removed of course. There was even the French equivalent of a five and dime with cheap wine glasses and a small plate at the end of the block to complete my vision.

I wandered two more blocks in a haze of sights and smells to make it to the green grass beneath the Eiffel Tower. Spreading out my prized possessions with no less enthusiasm than Gollum and his “precious” I finally sat back to take it all in… the one time I didn’t have my camera with me. (Note: camera fatigue is real and after 1,000 shots it does sink in even for the biggest shutterbug). Beautiful, and now I was hungry. I had denied myself even the smallest taste until my picnic was perfect.

Post-picnic orgasm -- laying spent in the grass, in the shadow of the Monsieur Eiffel’s radio bacon… I mean beacon, enjoying a mid-afternoon lull of red wine and a belly full of strawberries, cheese and baguette, et. al, I felt a deeper love for this city. One that came from the cockles, maybe the sub-cockles, of my heart. And one that made me profoundly sad when I shook myself out of my French daydream to find myself in front of the peanut butter in aisle 6 of the Pennington Stop & Shop. Sigh! Well at least I had it one day and man was I going back to Rue Cler the next time… until we meet again, Chere. Maybe this time I’d take my picnic to a bench along the Seine to watch the boats go by. 

Yeah, that’s a vision I can dig.

“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other,” Hemingway wrote. “Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it.”