An Ode To Grocery Stores In Foreign Countries

The Matchbook | 5.8.26

I’m going to shoot you straight here: there is almost nothing cool, good, beneficial, amusing, entertaining, or even remotely un-irritating about having food allergies and intolerances.

It sucks, plain and simple, it just sucks.

With one tiny exception, and that exception has actually bizarrely blossomed into one of the biggest benefits and unforeseen blessings to our weird wandering lives. That exception?

Grocery stores.

That’s right, grocery stores, supermarkets, corner bodegas, Tescos, Sainsburys, Hyper U, Aldi, Lidl, Co-Op, Warehouse, Countdown, Morrisons, Dunnes, or if we’re really fancy and want to spend £9 on a bottle of sparkling water, Waitrose or Marks & Spencers.

These have become not just the travel stops made necessary by my body’s insistence on severe histamine responses to certain foods, but often our favorite part of every adventure. We LOVE a grocery store, and we have more fond memories of our time wandering the strange aisles of distant and fluorescently lit oases of commerce than we do almost anything else.

Here’s to the extremely odd flavors of potato chips, the dessert treats with names like SUPER DICKMANSS, the eggs and milk that sit on shelves outside of refrigeration. Here’s to the avocados in Jamaica that are the size of cantaloupe, to the little kids outside of every shop in the Dominican Republic that want to carry your bags to your car for you, here’s to the 69p jugs of natural spring water that weigh far too much to carry all the way back to your hotel or Airbnb.

This is an ode to the questionable produce in places you’d expect something that looks like it came from the Garden of Eden, and to the most delicious carrots or apples you’ve ever tasted in the middle of a city you’d swear would be the poster child for FOOD DESERT. Here’s to the Jammy Dodgers, the Rich Tea biscuits, the Caramel Digestives, here’s to the weird tiny mayonnaise bottles that do not taste the same but will have to do as you make yet another hotel room sandwich the night before a flight back home. To the fizzy drinks and Lucozade, the things you buy when you cannot find a single bag of pretzels in 95% of countries.

A walk through a foreign grocery store is a walk into the normalcy of life in that place. It’s to step away from the hotels, the fancy restaurants, the diners or even the ‘off-the-grid’ local joints that still always seem to be swarming with tourists now that social media betrays any sense of secrecy. It’s to feel from there rather than simply visiting. It’s to buy the foods that people who actually live there buy, to see how they live, to eat how they actually eat, not only how a chef prepares the marquee dishes that they feel represents their culture.

A simple shop in a normal grocery store also opens doors, it leads to conversations with locals that sometimes give way to the best possible suggestions on what to see, what to do, where to go, and often most importantly, where to avoid wasting your time or money. It’s to get the side-eyed glances from people who can tell you don’t belong there, be it by the betrayal of your accent, or the way you fumble to find things.

I’m not going to tell you what to do, I’m not going to say you’re doing anything wrong if you’re not already doing this, but I’m just going to gently suggest something that helped change our lives:

Go grocery shopping on your next vacation or trip anywhere outside of your hometown. Go to the local grocery stores, not just the big chains that you know will be precisely as you already know them. Go wherever you are, buy the snacks, buy the funny fizzy drinks, buy the ingredients to make a meal those that live there make every day. Talk to the people you run into, have conversations with the employees, even if it’s barely understood, even if you don’t speak the language.

I’m allergic to everything, and somehow, it gave us so much beautiful insight into the way other people live their lives.

Somehow, I’m thankful.

I love you all.

Be good.

Also, Happy Happy Happy Birthday to my dear older sister Rian! I hope this year is the finest of all the years, and I hope that next year, we’re celebrating in Italy together, after a visit through one of their grocery stores together!