Supply & Demand

After avoiding it for months, I finally dragged myself to Costco the other day. My mother had offered to take Henry for the morning and I seized the opportunity to shop without my crazy bolter who likes to barrel through the aisles of the supermarket demanding matchbox cars and atrocious looking frosted cookies.

I have a total love/hate with that place. I generally find the rapport qualite-prix to be pretty darn good. And I love the big bags of avocados (GMO?), tubs of dates, gigantic jars of sundried tomatoes. At the same time, I find the whole experience kind of nauseating/overwhelming. I remember the first time I was in Costco back in 1995 (I think it was still Price Club back then). I had just come back to Virginia from Paris and was staying with my mother and stepfather (not far from where I live now). It blew me away—I swear I almost had a panic attack. Those massive 20 foot shelves. The insane amount of over-consumption. I got separated from my mother and (at age 24) almost started crying, like a preschooler who had lost her mommy. Then I found her and bought a tiny television set and a case of Power Bars to launch my new life in America. Now I’m just another harried housewife loading up the cart with giant bags of string cheese. I still hate to eat in there though, at those sad little plastic tables. I find it too depressing, like something out of a Don DeLillo novel. Not that I haven’t stooped to getting my kid a $1.08 dog and calling it lunch.

And then there’s the whole process of unloading and putting away all the stuff. Such a drag. The truth is, I’m still somewhat shocked/mildly disgusted by the sight of a full refrigerator. It goes against my minimalist nature. I long for my days in Paris when I picked up fresh produce from the local market as I walked home to my tiny flat off rue Lepic. There was an amazing rotisserie just a little way up the hill on rue des Abesses, a cheese shop, everything you could ask for. Or even New York, where I’d stop at a health food store on my way home from work or walk over to the eclectic little independent grocery store off Bedford (what was that place called?) with my old lady wheelie shopping basket. I wasn’t the kind of New York glamour girl who prided myself on having a totally empty refrigerator and used the oven for magazines or shoes. I had a fairly spacious kitchen in Brooklyn and I actually did cook from time to time. But everything was done on such a small scale.

Of course my lifestyle has changed: I’m feeding four healthy eaters now instead of one urban chick on a diet. But it also has to do with the way things are set up here in the exurbs. It’s just not possible to shop day by day when the closest decent grocery store is 15 miles away. So, I load the kids into my SUV, head to Costco and leave with a full cart. I’ll be getting my roasted chickens from Kirkland instead of rue des Abesses for the foreseeable future. The other day I did get to run into a small store for a few things while Christian waited in the car with the kids. It was incredibly liberating, although I nearly had a heart attack at one point when I looked over and Coco wasn’t in the cart.