Grocery cart envy and complicated choices? Real.

A funny-ish story about pepitas > Pringles, and aptly-named people we want in our boat.

So there I was, waiting for the Dairy Boss to hopefully return with buttermilk. In what’s got to be a harbinger of our AI future, buttermilk is shockingly hard to find these days. Actually, AI has nothing to do with what may not even be a buttermilk shortage, but since everyone’s talking about it, I thought I’d include it for relevance.

For the past at least five weeks, my local well-supplied store has offered a single option for buttermilk and this is why I’m the proud new owner of a bottle the size of an oxygen tank. I need one cup.

While waiting, I surreptitiously eyed the cart of strangers picking out half-gallons of chocolate milk near me and was surprised by a wave of envy. That’s right. Their cart was enough to cause one of the seven deadly sins in me, and it’s going to be embarrassing to tell you what their cart contained: Two half-gallons of regular milk (not embarrassing), several cans of Pringles potato chips, and multiple trays of Chips Ahoy! cookies.

If you’ve never typed out a sentence involving Chips-Ahoy! you’ve never wondered as I now find myself doing whether Nabisco regrets including an exclamation point in the brand name. Autocorrect assumes you’ve moved on after the seafaring declaration of “Chips Ahoy!” when really you’re just getting started.

Please note the prominence of the exclamation point. Also, please note my commitment to include it in every use in this piece.

In my cart were many responsible things like gobs of fresh produce, obscure ingredients to make a vegan Korean dish my friend Amy raves about, unsweetened Greek yogurts, and ingredients with which to make homemade granola, including pepitas. Speaking of pepitas: Did you even know these are pumpkin seeds BUT NOT the white pumpkin seeds with the shell and all the fiber? Somehow I made it to 43 without anyone telling me this essential information. Also—and here’s where I’m going to change your grocery shopping life—did you know you can ask the pick-list shoppers for help locating items?

My life was changed after I, so apologetically, asked one such employee for help finding pepitas. Not to brag, but I feel like I have above-average grocery store finding skills and tenacity, and the fact I hadn’t been able to find them on the past multiple visits told me that they didn’t exist at this store. But just to be insultingly positive of this fact, I asked Sunny, a friendly man who proved to be very aptly-named. He searched on his handy device to see if they had them, escorted me several aisles away from his pick-list cart to take me right to them, then offered to go back and get my cart and bring it to me.

Aren’t some people just the best? When I declared him my hero and thanked him SO MUCH, he responded with an earnest, “It’s no problem! It’s our job. Without customers, we don’t have a job.”

And here I’ve avoided asking them for help all these years of pepitas ignorance. I assumed they were on a time-sensitive mission for pick-up customers and absolutely not to be interrupted by humble in-store shoppers like me. Just think what a person can accomplish in their life with no more time spent helplessly canvassing grocery store aisles!

Anyhow, back to my deadly sin of grocery cart envy. Was it that I actually wanted to switch the content of our carts? No. I do embarrassingly like the taste of things like Pringles and Chips-Ahoy! cookies, and my love affair with chocolate milk started early with those school lunch cardboard milk-in-boxes. But I do enjoy and know my body much prefers things like vegetables and hemp seed hearts and stuff like this homemade granola.

What I actually envied was their seemingly no-guilt approach to grocery shopping. Whereas there I was, feeling like the girl from Inside Out with various and sometimes contradictory voices helping inform my food choices. The cast of characters?

We have Amy, my most disciplined friend and the proponent of the Korean tofu dish. She is a busy mom to four little ones and eats no animal products, no oils, but lots of good carbs.

Next we have my older brother, Abe. His morning oatmeal is like an edible morning constitutional. He’s also the creator of nutrition-packed “salad smoothies,” prioritizes lean animal proteins, makes his own yogurt, and minimizes non-fruit and vegetable carbs.

Then we have my paternal grandmother, Barbara. Barbara was the boss of healthy eating before it was cool. Cue memories of things like carob chips as a “replacement” for chocolate chips (the quotations marks are brutally necessary here since said chips are a substitute in shape only) and whey powder popcorn balls. This gem of life advice from her still rings in my ears: “The whiter the bread, the quicker you’re dead.”

Not a single one of these characters approves of Pringles, Chips Ahoy! cookies, or chocolate milk.

Add to their voices of nutritional advice all the other advice a person receives via Instagram and podcasts and casual conversations and I was left waffling on even my healthy choices.

All the advice and opinions and lifestyles can rattle around in a person’s head making you question literally everything you pick up or eat: “Nothing we eat is real food anyway, given our depleted soil and ALL THE PESTICIDES.” (They always ramp up to something extra depressing.) Or, they say, “Protein is the most important thing to prioritize.” Or, “Forget protein. Fiber should be your main priority.”

You just can’t please them all. It’s sometimes enough to make you want to abandon the course and eat like our dairy section friends. But we don’t.

We press on, clinging desperately to hope that somehow the carrots and celery and organic string cheese and pepitas have gotta to be at least a little bit better for our bodies than Pringles and Chips Ahoy! We cling to that hope much like someone lost at sea clings to their raft before finally being able to holler, “Land Ahoy!” And we pack our shellless pumpkin seeds (Protein! Fiber!) and welcome people like Sunny into our boat, because, man, who doesn’t want that kind of energy in their life raft?

Important take-aways:

1. Don’t assume stuff.

2. Maybe it really does matter what you name your kids.

3. Don’t take all your nutrition-influencing voices shopping at the same time.

Isn’t life cool, and are people interesting? See you in the next one…

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