Food shopping can be hard to stomach
The most profound reality-check for students living the vacation life of college is grocery shopping. For us, it is a vile act of peering into the Mirror of Galadriel and seeing ourselves ten, twenty and thirty years in the future still lost somewhere between the deli meats and the Mallowmars. Unlike the personal grooming habits that we’ve been taught throughout our young lives, searching for canned foods on a budget for most college students is completely foreign and seldom talked about in a communal environment. Perhaps because of its personal nature, the topic is often swept under the rug and covered with tales of underage drinking and teenage pregnancy. Why kid ourselves? You may not drink underage or get pregnant before marriage, and even if you do, counseling will be readily available as will support groups. But as certain as death you will go grocery shopping and nobody will be there to help you. I was first forced to confront this fact only a couple of years ago when I finally decided to quit commuting and move to Milledgeville. Other than a few sporadic warnings of spending too much I was never really consulted about the cold hard facts of the process. A grocery store is like a hospital. It has two completely different faces, a pleasant one for the family in the waiting room, and a sterile hell for the sucker on the slab. As a child I practically skipped down the aisles while my mother suffered to reconstruct her, list so that it fit the stores new layout. I sipped sample Gatorade while she shuffled on hands and knees through gallons of pasteurized milk to find the latest expiration date. I once found myself face to face with an ex-girlfriend in Wal-Mart. I was shifting through frozen dinners with a cart full of cranberry juice. When she inquired about my new taste for cranberry juice I was forced to explain my late kidney infection. I tried come up with an effective lie, but there’s really no other use for cranberry juice. If you want to avoid the social faux pas of grocery shopping you have to know what you’re doing. Here’s a quick crash course: 1. Make a List – Your list isn’t just some scratches on a torn piece of paper. It’s your game plan. It’s your entire operation. Know what you have in your kitchen and know specifically what you need. Know your budget and know what each item is going to run you. 2. Get In, Get Out – College students typically look like fish when they’re shopping. We wander around wide-eyed and directionless, attracted to anything with a yellow sticker. The bells and whistles of Ben and Jerry’s and twelve hundred different variations of the same cereal are like siren songs for us. Time and space distorts and all sensory perception stretches out in front of us like a tunnel. An hour long trip turns into three hours. Twenty dollars turns into fifty. Students get lost. Sometimes they don’t come back. Stick to your list and your budget, they are everything. 3. Shop with a friend – This one is questionable because some of your friends are better than others. Remember that in battle, a friend isn’t just a friend, they’re a comrade. They can either help you out or slow you down. Choose wisely. 4. Don’t Shop Hungry – If your list is well thought out and you have the self discipline that most of us lack then this shouldn’t be a problem. But if you’re like most of us, you are at your most vulnerable to those bells and whistles when you’re hungry, and more likely to buy everything on the shelf that you wish was in your stomach. Stay strong. 5. Talk About It – I know it’s hard, but this is something that everybody has to face. As a liberal arts community we shouldn’t be afraid to put it out there. Yeah, I’m Eric and I have no idea if pitted olives means they’ve had the pits removed or if they are in fact "with pit." I’m not ashamed of this, and I know I’m not the only one.
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Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Jan 25 2008. Filed under Opinion.
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