grocery shopping

I have walked down countless grocery store aisles. A Hy-vee in Iowa is the same as a Pricechopper in Vermont and a Safeway in Maryland. I have walked down the aisles of far too many Super Walmarts. Grocery shopping in the United States is a mundane task. Food is advertised by its cardboard packaging. In Korea when I first ventured into Lottemart, I was delighted. There were a new variety of vegetables, fruit, seafood, and meat. But try actually shopping there, and you can only hear the din of the grocery store workers shouting advertisements. Even though I could not understand what they were screaming, the noise from their lips only gave me a headache. This is not a criticism of individual workers, but the fact that their job requires for them to scream ads about squid, beef, and fish. Shopping at Lottemart makes me miss the phony soft music of grocery stores in the US.

A few weeks ago, I walked through a street market in Incheon. Instead of fake cardboard advertisements, fresh seafood, beef, pork, fruit, vegetables advertised itself. You didn’t see a picture of perfect food, but saw real food. Beef was not packaged into nice plastic packages, oranges were not perfect spheres, fish was not sold in fillets, and dried goods were not packaged with a enlarged picture to show the texture. The aroma, a mixture of meat, seafood, fruit and vegetables, and a small bakery, was surprisingly nice. The experience was real. All five senses were engaged in this grocery shopping experience. You can see and smell the ripeness of a fruit, not the letters R-I-P-E or the Korean equivalent. You can see that the fish is fresh, because they kill it in front of you, not because it says GUARANTEED FRESH TASTE on a cardboard box.

As I was walking through this market with a friend, suddenly we were stopped. My friend taught the children of one of the vendors, and spontaneously we were invited for coffee, and Korean melon. At once I felt the friendliness of this family, and the fruit they were selling is not just fruit anymore, but the labor of this family. And happily we walk away with a bag of fruit, after coffee and a little bit of catching up.