Fresh vegetables are a blessing

Yesterday my true love, feeding my interest in food history, sent me a clipping from a British newspaper called “Woman’s World.”  It was an article entitled “‘Prepack’ Horizon” written by Rosemary Small and it opens thusly:  “In 1954 we bought 100,000 “prepacks” – food ready, cleaned and packaged.  Last year we bought 120 million, and this year the figure is expected to be well over 200 million.”

The “we” in that paragraph probably refers to U.K. consumers and it’s not clear whether she’s speaking of ready to serve meals or ready to cook foods but nevertheless the clipping ticked my nostalgia gland.  Since I’d also recently completed a series of blogs on markets, I was struck by how our ability to buy food has changed over the years.

When I was little, Thursday was shopping day.  We lived in Needham, a Boston suburb, and my mother and her mother would pack the kids up in the station wagon to go to the Star Market, a supermarket in Wellesley, the next town over.  To provide a sense of scale, this “supermarket” was a CVS drug store when I last saw the building in 2002.  The produce department of my local Whole Foods might be larger than the entire store.

I can remember hundreds of details about that store but what I remember most is that the produce section was in the last aisle, not the first.  It didn’t even occupy an entire aisle, because it shared space with magazines, and nearly all of the produce was wrapped in cellophane, not unlike this picture from DuPont.  Lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, all wrapped in cellophane and (not shown in this picture) laid on a bed of shaved ice.  In this particular grocery store, all of the fresh fruits and veggies were rewrapped in cellophane and I grew up thinking that’s how tomatoes and brussels sprouts (yuck) were sold.  By the way, this picture is taken from an informative blog post by Cory  Bernat called Food culture, supermarkets, and packaging for the Smithsonian’s Stories from the National Museum of American History.

The ad copy implies that the cellophane is designed to ensure that the veggies are “clean and fresh” but I later learned that this wasn’t the principal reason for the prepackaging.  My first job, like that of hundreds of thousands of other teenagers, was working in the local supermarket.  In this case, it was Julio’s Market in Westboro, Massachusetts.  This was in 1971 and while the produce section was in the first aisle (sharing the aisle with the meat counter), almost everything was still prepackaged.  Notice, though, I said almost.  There were some loose items and as employees, we hated them.

In 1971, the cash registers didn’t have scales so every time a customer wanted to buy something that wasn’t packaged, somebody in the produce section had to weigh it and mark it so the cashiers would know how much to charge.  During the day when the produce manager was there it wasn’t too bad (although god forbid she had to leave the floor for lunch or to receive an order) but nights and weekends it was awful.  Since there wasn’t enough business to park a clerk in produce, a customer who wanted three apples had to find a clerk somewhere, interrupt what they were doing to bring them to the produce section, and while the clerk weighed and priced the apples, the customer whined about how inconvenient it all was.

Fortunately, most people didn’t buy cello-wrapped fresh vegetables back then.  They bought canned vegetables.  The picture at the right is from a Del Monte ad but if you combine this with two or three other brands, plus a house brand, you get the idea.  In my grocery store, two entire aisles (out of nine) were devoted to canned fruits and vegetables and those aisles had the fastest turnover of anything in the store except bread and meat (there was no fresh fish in those days).  People would come to the register with dozens of cans of veggies, perhaps supplemented by a few packages of frozen peas or spinach as well.

The selection was pretty limited as well.  For example, apples meant Delicious apples.  Period.  For anything else, during apple season you could travel to a country farmstand to buy a bag of Macintoshes, but Fuji, Pink Lady, Honeycrisp, Monsu, Gala, or Jonagold?  Nope.  I can remember the first Granny Smiths in Westboro causing a commotion of major proportions. During the summer, you could buy a package of summer squash but zucchini was something exotic you could only buy at a farmstand.  And don’t even think about things like fresh herbs, kiwi fruit, endive, okra, or escarole.

This might be why I can’t take modern food shopping for granted.  I can go into any supermarket today and buy dozens and dozens of things that simply weren’t available to my mother when she was planning her menus in the 1960s.  Not only that, I’m not a slave to packaging.  Since I usually cook for either one or two people, buying large quantities of fresh produce usually results in waste and I’d rather not do that for a variety of reasons.  So since my parrots eat seven green grapes a day, I can buy them only a week’s worth so they don’t go bad.  I can buy an assortment of one each of five different kinds of apples to keep snacking interesting.  And I can buy a single large handful of okra when I feel like sautéed okra for a side dish.

So thank you Whole Foods, Acme, Safeway, Kroger, Wegman’s, and all the rest of you for making vidalia onions and fresh dill a daily reality but I can’t stop there because I need to go back to markets. The picture at the left was taken this past January in the Borough Market in the Southwark area of London.  If I wasn’t about to freeze to death, I could have spent hours there.  Just look at how beautiful these vegetables are – and not only that, there are colors of carrots I’ve never seen before, at least two vegetables I can’t identify from the picture, and I’m salivating over those parsnips (and the price!!!).

I’ve written about the market at Campo di Fiori in Rome, and the Italian Market and Reading Terminal in Philadelphia but visiting markets is always a high priority when we travel.  Even though most of the time I can’t cook what I see in the market (although we usually do have a kitchen when we travel to Paris), I find the gorgeous produce (sometimes exotic, sometimes merely perfect), the fresh meat and fish, the flowers, the baked goods, the charcuterie, and all of it to be simply intoxicating.

People who are younger than I am may not realize how lucky they are that supermarkets routinely carry fresh food, and I’m told that a childhood of canned green beans and cello-wrapped iceberg lettuce may have been a suburban thing.  Neighborhood greengrocers did carry fresh vegetables and I’m sure country kids had access to good fruits and vegetables.  But for me, the difference between the Acme and Whole Foods near my house and the Star Market (or Julio’s Supermarkets) of my childhood is dramatic and when entering the realm of a market where the leeks were in the ground a day or two ago, you enter the realm of magic.