Super Store Super Sad

Before Lunch

Farm update: Nothing.

Spent some time on the internet today and learned that I have nothing to do but wait .

I wait, I wait for the fruit to ripen on farms, I wait for this love affair to bear fruit, if it will. 11 days a love affair too early to know, too early to say.

Mother Pazienza Sicilia teaches me.

This morning I was invited to visit him where he works, at a local Super Market. I was nervous and did my best to just shop, as though I was shopping as I do nearly every day.The produce looked terrible. There were some decent values on pasta and dairy, but the produce looked pretty sad. Perhaps it was the miserable fluorescent lights. More likely it was the miserable produce man. He was sad. I detected a fallen hero. In fact all the men working there seemed sad. Dignified, professional, precise and proud. Yet like lions in cages. I guess that makes the supermarket a zoo.

Sad. The markets in Italy I remember from 1986 burst with flavor, color, aromas, bustle and bravado. I first came here in those days before the super store, cheap meat imports and the outlawing of unpasteurized milk products. To shop and to eat authentically is now a crime or an impossibility. How can you sanitize a Mediterranean country? Would you destroy the bacteria that makes yogurt? Would you kill the mold that makes Gorgonzola blue, bread rise, or kraut saur? Would you outlaw the spit that makes milk into curative Kefir?

Yes, I am afraid, yes.

There will always be contraband dairy as long as cows are milked before they are cooked, and kefir as long as we have saliva. As long as somebody with a square of land and spits his watermelon seeds, vegetables with grow and we will have a chance to reclaim our food. But who will set these caged kings free? It's obvious that these men all 35-60 years old have worked their metiers a long time before coming to this supermarket. It's not like the USA where the guy behind the deli counter is part time, working his way through school. These men are the real deal. When I asked him about this, he said yes, each owned their own businesses at one time. Himself included.

I paid and set out to put the groceries in his Citroen. I rode my bike home.

Looking for the car
His Car

Something about a picture being worth a thousand words...

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