#MOC19: Supermarket Shopping in the Time of Coronavirus

One of the standard so-called jokes I make with students, at the beginning of each semester, is that I encourage them to contact me any way they’d like for the class’ duration. Email, social media, old-fashioned voice calls, texting, a letter written on parchment with quill and ink and sealed with blood-red wax. “But if you see me at Shop-Rite,” I add, “It’s probably best you just move to the side and get out of my way.”

I say it’s a joke. It’s not—not really. For some reason during every weekly visit to the local supermarket, I encounter not only students, but a random sample of everyone else I know. School administrators. People from church. Neighbors. My physician. My physician’s receptionist. Random writers from workshops I attended years ago. And every single one of them to a man or woman, with hesitant expressions, has told me later when they encounter me elsewhere, “I saw you at the grocery store but I was afraid to say hello to you because you looked so…um…intent on your shopping.”

It’s a kind way, I think, of telling me how manic I seem when I’m behind the wheels of a shopping cart.

To say that I’m focused when I’m prowling for groceries is underselling. Upon crossing the threshold of Shop-Rite, I transform into a falcon—my eyesight becomes eight times sharper than any mere human as I peer from the produce section to see what’s on sale at the deli, or as I fly into the bread aisle to spy if potato buns are in stock far at the other end. In every aisle I’m like one of my cats on squirrel patrol in a window, no longer a cuddly layabout but a vicious feline, pupils at their widest, whiskers bristling, tail whipping, my head unmoving as I keep my quarry of the last flank steak in unwavering focus. I am the king of the lions, cutting at top speed through the lesser species of the supermarket savannah in pursuit of my quarry. Behind that cart I become a grocery predator—and I like to savage and capture my prey and return to my den as quickly as humanly possible.

I always take exquisite care with my meal planning. Every dinner gets plotted out on the calendar; I leave a blank space for the traditional Friday night dinner out. I’m always disposed to meals that provide leftovers, both because I like them, and because they’re an opportunity for one less night I have to spend at the stove. From the calendar I create extensive lists to save on my phone, covering ingredients not only for dinners, but for our usual grab-and-go breakfasts and lunches. I’ve always kept a well-stocked pantry of staples to have at hand—rices, beans, boxes of pasta and jars of pasta sauce and sofrito, spices, flour, sugar—for my regular use and in case there’s a need to improvise a meal.

Improvisation is my last resort, though. Sure, I can whip up a last-minute spicy fried rice with pantry items, an egg or two, and remnants of the Christmas ham from the freezer—but isn’t it nicer to avoid that last-minute uncertainty by putting on the calendar and making certain I’ve got frozen edamame to include in it? I’m willing to eat a lazy-ass one-man cacio e pepe any day of the week when I’m on my own. I’ve always got pasta in the cupboard and parmesan in the fridge. But for two does such an easy dish really, I hear in my mom’s distant voice, constitute a proper meal?

For years meal planning has been my bedrock. It’s what I do first thing every new week. In a way it’s my sanity, the one thing I know will kick off even the gloomiest of Monday mornings. I plan our meals, I make my list, I hit the supermarket like a man possessed. I buy every item on my list—nothing more, nothing less—and then I return home to store away my foodstuffs. The structure of the week is settled. The hunter-gatherer in me beats his hairy chest and is pleased.

Only that’s all changed now, in this era of pandemic, hasn’t it?

I hadn’t at all been surprised at the notion of COVID-19 reaching New York City and Westchester; I didn’t expect, however, for it to arrive so suddenly. When I’d been on my own the first week of March, the prudent planner in me thought he was doing enough by buying extra-large bags of both white and brown rice, as well as a few extra boxes of dried pasta. However, when Connecticut started to shut down the second week of March, and we’d heard from friends that the store shelves were emptying rapidly, it was plain that we really hadn’t stocked up enough on food that would get us through a long period of isolation, if necessary.

It’s not as if our fridge was empty. (It’s not as if our fridge is ever empty.) My pantry of staples was fairly well stocked, and I certainly had two heavy bags of rice and all that pasta with which to work. Inside my chest freezer were a number of portions of black beans that I’d pressure-cooked in previous weeks, as well as several divvied-up half-pounds of ground beef and, for some reason, frozen veal patties enough for two months’ worth of dinner. Also frozen: three kringle pastries we’d received as a Christmas gift, several pounds of leftovers from that fabled Christmas ham, and multiple containers of an unsuccessful Mexican noodle dish (even typing those last three words out, I now ask myself, why?) I’d attempted whose leftovers weren’t tasty enough to consume immediately, yet weren’t awful enough to justify throwing away. We weren’t going to starve.

Maybe some of that mainstream panic seeped in, though. Over the weekend we felt an increasing sense of urgency to get to the supermarket. To stock up. Toilet paper was sold out everywhere, we’d heard—fine. We still had the better part of a Costco bulk package of that stuff. Disinfectant wipes? We’d snagged a large five-tub pack only a few weeks ago when they were on sale. Hand sanitizer? We’d bought dozens on sale before the Christmas holidays, and still had most. Somehow when it came to food, though, we felt an urgency to get what we could, while we could.

I made a meal plan for two weeks. So the word was that entire aisles of Italian food were cleaned out save for lasagna noodles? Well, I make several different very good lasagnas, and with the leftovers those suckers can last for four entire meals. So I put the ingredients for a lasagna on the list. I could make porcupine meatballs with the rice and beef I already had, and that would cover a couple of meals. I could buy a pound of fresh chorizo and use half to make Craig’s favorite chori-pollo, then freeze the other half for another meal down the road.

The act of planning, in the face of a pandemic, gave me a sense of security. We would triumph over this uncertain time through the magical power of lists! Thinking about dropping every one of those items in my cart, accompanied by the satisfying tap of checking off that ingredient in my shopping app, made me feel safe against the encroaching epidemiological tide. In your face, coronavirus. We went to bed that night pledging to get up at seven, when Shop-Rite opened, to beat the crowds.

Then we actually got to the store.

At seven-thirty in the morning, Shop-Rite wasn’t crowded. There weren’t hordes of panicked shoppers crashing into each other. The parking lot was fairly empty, in fact. Inside, people went about their business—mostly at a distance of six feet from each other—as usual. Yet while the shelves weren’t completely empty (except in the paper goods aisle, which was completely cleaned out), I think it’s fair to say that I almost immediately recognized my careful meal planning was going to face certain, well, challenges.

There was fresh produce aplenty. The deli meats section was stocked about as well as usual. When we rounded the corner to survey the refrigerated meat section, though, I was shocked. I’d expected maybe certain cuts to be sold out, but there was nothing whatsoever to be had. Nothing. Just long empty open refrigerated shelves. The Italian food aisle was hit-or-miss with sauces and tomato products, but had been stripped of every noodle—except lasagna noodles, which I collected. Shoppers had also avoided any dried pasta made from chickpeas, or whole wheat, or vegetables. The bread aisle was sparse, but the long tiers of snack food barely had been touched. There were plenty of dairy products and cheeses and eggs, but the frozen foods were hit or miss. The dried beans and rices had been devoured entirely.

So there I was in Shop-Rite, behind the cart, my senses alert and quivering, my focus intent, my list on the phone in my hand. For the first time in a very long time, I was completely adrift. Very few of the meals I’d planned upon were viable with the hodgepodge of ingredients left on the shelves. All my planning had let me down.

It was the first time since I’d heard of COVID-19 that I started to panic. Part of me wanted to snatch whatever random items were left and bang them into the cart. Could I live for a month off of Sour Patch Kids and white cheddar popcorn. That’s possible, right? With some Chef Boyardee?

Unwilling to betray my internal hysteria, though, I clamped down and juggled decisions in my mind. Okay, so there was no Italian sausage for the lasagna—but I did have ground beef at home I could use, and here were some pre-cooked links of turkey Italian sausage in the prepared foods section. I could slice those thinly and make them work. Okay, so I couldn’t make chori-pollo without either the chori or the pollo, but maybe that could be the night I broke out a couple of those veal patties instead. This package of chicken sausages could be cooked like hot dogs, and served with homemade fries. That was a meal I hadn’t planned. What about a pancake dinner? Those were always fun.

I suppose I became focused in another way entirely. Instead of zipping from item to pre-planned item like a man on a mission, I took stock on what ingredients were at hand and made on-the-spot mental calculations about what components might be stockpiled, what might be substituted (could I use pasta sauce I already had at home for the porcupine meatballs instead of out-of-stock tomato sauce? Why the heck not!), and what meals needed to be jettisoned altogether.

We haven’t had to return to the supermarket for the last two weeks. We haven’t starved. I keep imagining headlines like Couple Found Dead of Malnutrition Had Twenty-Five Pounds of Veal Stockpiled in Freezer, Police Say, but our diets haven’t been particularly monotonous. My on-the-spot strategy of recalibrating my perfect disaster planning was successful, overall.

But I hated it. I know that the next time we have to venture out to Shop-Rite, I’m not going to be able to zip through the aisles on my laser-focused hunt for precisely twenty-four items that will comprise our meals for the week, but that I’ll have to do it with an ‘open mind’. With ‘flexibility’ as my biggest priority. (Picture me saying those words with mocking finger quotes and a sneer on my face.)

But I know unless things have drastically changed for the better at the supermarket, in the two weeks we’ve not been out of the house, that careful scheduling and planning will not be the bulwark never failing that I’ve relied upon in the past. For the indeterminate future, uncertainty at the supermarket is an unwelcome guest.

I dread its tenancy.




This essay has been written as part of the Mass Observation: COVID-19 writing project. If you'd like to join our volunteer writers, visit our Call for Volunteers at https://bit.ly/3aes2AQ .