Heaven is a foreign supermarket

originally published for Desmond & Dempsey

I can take or leave museums. If you've seen one cathedral you've seen them all. find Monuments IRL are so often deflating. I lack the short legs and attention span to navigate galleries at anyone's pace but my own. While I do comb bookstores for potential foreign husbands, much of my time abroad—and in life—is spent in supermarkets.

My best friend has a saying: if I've been in your house, I've been in your bathroom cabinet. The difference between us is that she is a model with frustratingly beautiful skin, and I am a drifter who collects marmalade. I say: if I've been in your country, I've been in your pantry. I've raided your grocery store. 

Foreign ones are particularly erotic to me; a place to discover new products, assess regional font preferences, and grapple my unrequited love of Denmark. They exhilarate and soothe me; my nightclub and my church. Without sounding like a 9/11 truther, you need only be let down by the Mono Lisa once to realise the Louvre is an elaborate scam—a simple yet efficient decoy from the real national treasures. You know where you won't find one zillion people pretending to touch the top of a pyramid? Monoprix. You know what you will find? Speculoos! Foie gras by the tin! Family sized packs of madeleines! Lemon curd! Apricot jam! Instant packet pastry cream. For less than the price of admission. 

Condiments mean a lot to me, and I live for the thrill of discovering new ones abroad. Like a fool, I've spent actual money to stare blankly at artwork I could have googled, whereas handsomely packaged sardines make me actually shiver. In the clean, calm, bracingly cold aisles of Singaporean marts are jars of kaya—a Southeast Asian approximation of caramel—ready to be spread thicky over toast. The bottom shelves of Swiss chain markets are filled with brandless slabs of chocolate that could rival the fancier stuff from anywhere. And it could be yours! All yours, for less than 3 francs. While I need to be heavily pep-talked and lightly sedated before entering a Trader Joe's in Manhattan, the dried pineapple - plump, chewy, with almost-caramelised frills—is undoubtedly worth the quest. In Sweden I stock up on Daim bars—buttery milk chocolate with shards of toffee—and visions of hot blond people buying knekkebrod. In Hong Kong's clinically bright Muji (while not technically a supermarket), it is sleeves of powder-soft-candy (?) in crisp sleeves. I'm not sure exactly what they are, I just like the way words look in other languages. A reservoir of (what I think is) Iranian mango nectar sits proudly on my fridge, forever too pretty to open. I bought it for the font. (I always buy it for the font.)

And it's not just condiments to be found, but clues! Supermarkets are veritable founts of what I consider to be important cultural insights. Who could have guessed that financially buoyant Norway harbours a love of frozen-pizza? Perverts like me, that's who. The early-aughts pop music in culturally-belated Cape Town, tells us that South Africa's musical-jetlag continues post the Rodriquez saga. America's mega marts are both a sonnet to capitalism and an embarrassing display of its culinary affronts. It is through their custom of flavouring products with what seem like entirely separate and texturally-dependent meals ("lemon meringue pie flavoured yoghurt"), that we learn that something as primal as food, something as straightforward as feeding ourselves, does not come as naturally to some as most evolutionary theories would suggest. In the freezer section: frozen hamburgers—bun and all! Contrast with LA's health mecca Erewhon, and its squillion dollar coconut yoghurt, for a culinary cross-section of the USA. A short flight away, Barbadian mini-marts (emphasis on the mini) genuflect toward the UK; Imported Cadbury bars in lieu of regional equivalents hint at the lasting power of colonial rule. A few local gems: banana soda and tutti-frutti flavoured milk. I bought three packets of MSG just because I could. And now? No salad dressing will be ever made without it. Which makes you really realise that these are not just places to learn about others, but ourselves. It is in supermarkets I have formed my own personal yardstick of affluence; I'll have "made it" when my weekly shop is from Dean and Deluca. Nipping off to Harrod's for bread and milk is my touchstone of glam. Every holiday may have a return flight, but you can taste a place for just a little bit longer with the right souvenirs.