Have you ever stopped to think about how marvelous it is to go grocery shopping? How delightful and beautiful and amazing! We get to drive to the local market—we have in fact a variety of markets to choose from. We walk into a brightly lit and clean store with signs labeling where everything is while employees in black aprons stock the shelves and offer to bag our food at check out.
And there's such a variety: canned and dried and bottled and frozen and refrigerated and, of course, fresh. Huge bins of ripened or soon-to-be-ripe fruit and vegetables. The mounds, the pyramids, the boxes of periodically sprayed greenery! Could anyone before the 1800's ever have imagined that there would be such a place? That anyone might finger the bananas and see a slight bruising on the underside and thus decide not to buy that particular bunch. That cooks and bloggers would search out peppers and roots and herbs that never used to grow within the same region but now are neatly arranged side by side.
Oh, the colors and shapes and textures! The eggplant purple and deep-sea blue in the blueberries and the furry brown kiwi and the marbled watermelon and the fuchsia of the dragon fruit. Some grocery stores even arrange their fruit by color. Then, there are the variety of greens dripping with the moisture from the misters. The shelves look like tropical gardens with hanging plants.
I pack my cart with food for the week, with slices of meat wrapped in white paper and cartons of pasteurized sweet milk, with blocks of weirdly-orange cheese and cans of pulverized tomatoes. I bring it all home to my kitchen where I stock the shelves and refrigerator drawers with all the things that will fill our tummies for the week.
What a world! What a privilege!
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