What is that? I wondered as I stared at the large box in the basement. A high school friend and I were visiting her aunt in suburban New Jersey and we were sent down to retrieve something from what turned out to be their chest freezer. Filled with cuts of meat and who knows what else, I was simply stunned. In my one-bedroom apartment in Yorkville we never had more than an extra roll of toilet paper hanging around.
This was the way of my city-dweller parents. We always had enough food but there was no such thing as storage. And we certainly didn’t have a pantry. Just a couple of cabinets with some canned vegetables and a jar of instant coffee.
Of course, at the time, there were three grocery stores located within two blocks of our apartment. There was the A&P across the street, the D’Agostino, on First Avenue, and Grand Union, across 86th Street. To say nothing of the German gourmet shops, such as Schaller & Weber, and Bremen House, where my mother regularly shopped, as well.
It wasn’t until I left for college that I started to understand that distance creates a new food issue: one of transportation. If you don’t have a car and you’re hauling food on a bus, you are limited by the amount you can carry.
When I met my future mother-in-law, Maria Prytula, I began to understand pantries, grocery shopping and food transportation as a whole other animal. Maria took this practice to another level, turning it, like so many of her activities, into an art form. She had to, living 14 miles from town. She made daily trips but it was never because there was no food. It was simply to stock up. Bread was purchased at one store, but produce at another. Seafood came from a separate market and tea – well, that was just a whole other story. Oh, did I mention she was the queen of “day old”? And all this in one town in Virginia.
Our pantry – open shelving – is part of our kitchen and we have small jam jars and large Masons filled with sugar, flour, spices, and beans. It’s a working kitchen because my husband, God bless him, does the cooking and I do the baking. And if there is one thing that will set my husband on edge, it is a soon-to-be empty ’fridge. Panic shopping and large grocery bills are something I know a lot about.
This has been on my mind a lot these days, as I make my daily trips to Key Food and plan in a different way than I ever have before. The lines at the Food Coop are untenable. I go to Key Food every morning when they open. I check in with the employees; ask them how they’re doing. The Miller Lite delivery man says he’s happy he’s still working.
I was looking through some old essays yesterday. I found one I had started years ago, where I wrote that food was never my thing. Did I write that? Of course, food is my thing. I love food, and nothing more than a lovely, home-cooked dinner with friends and family. But food, as it is for many, was a loaded issue when I was growing up because my mother’s family – and, as it turned out, my future mother-in-law’s family – survived Stalin’s Holodomor and subsequently World War II. Needless to say, there were no food choices when I was little. You ate what was put in front of you. End of discussion.
Times of chaos make you think very differently than times of peace. As with everything else right now, I am thinking about food in a different way than I ever did before.