Grocery Shopping in a Land Crazy about Food Freshness
POMARICO, Italy — It’s a bright morning in late June as I make my way down the sidewalk of a narrow thoroughfare in the center of town, launched on a chore that seems to obsess Italians of all walks of life:
Food shopping.
It’s a welcoming cultural shift to relocate to a country that’s so passionate about the freshness of its food. For now, I no longer push a cumbersome steel cart around the aisles of a Costco or some other mega-supermarket as I do back home in San Francisco, buying products in bulk that have been shipped in from throughout the nation and the world.
Here, I buy local.
Not just from Italy, or the region, but often fruit and vegetables that have been grown with care within a few miles of where I stand; ingredients largely free of growth hormones, pesticides and preservatives that cuts down on their shelf life, but render them as fresh and sweet and authentic as the daily life here.
It’s all part of La Dolce Vita.
Most rural Italians, if they can, do their food shopping daily, not weekly. Of course in the big cities such as Rome, Florence or Milan, there are large markets like the ones back home, and busy professionals shop when they can, after work or on weekends.
But here, in Italy’s rural southern reaches, the pace is much slower, more leisurely. Chances are, as they sit down to an afternoon meal, the ingredients that my cousins and their neighbors consume have been purchased that very morning.
And the merchants are always waiting.
Here along the central Via Roma, there are signs for the local butcher, bread maker and fishmonger, as well as tiny speciality markets and one that sells nothing but local fruit and vegetables.
And it is here that I usually begin my rounds, carrying a reusable shopping bag that bears the image of a bucolic rural scene, perhaps the very growing fields where much of this bounty was born.
But I am not alone. Far from it.
They are out early, these local housewives, or casalinghe, standing in line among a selection of olives, lemons, apples and heads of lettuce, some pulling their nonna, or grandmother, bags-on-wheels contraptions.
I had heard all about the sharp-elbowed Italian grandmothers who brusquely cut in line, but here in Pomarico I have found none of that. Perhaps it’s because here everybody knows everybody else and to budge ahead of your neighbor is not exactly La Bella Figura, the social guide of grace and manners that rules the lives of many Italians.
Still, here among the garlic and beetroot, carrots, cucumbers, artichokes and black cabbage, a seemingly bizarre purchasing process takes place. Because here in rural Italy, you don’t fondle that peach for squeezable freshness, or poke your finger into a basket of mushrooms to search for something hidden that might have gone bad.
Oh, no.
In the big cities, supermarkets provide plastic gloves you can use to delicately make your selections, with shoppers careful to touch only the items they plan to buy.
But in Pomarico, you wait in line for your vegetables, as the proprietress serves each individual customer in turn, the daughters, mothers and grandmothers who make selections that are quickly wrapped and weighed so the buyer can be sent on her way.
I learned about this hands-off policy the hard way.
Decades ago, on my very first trip to Italy, I perused the offerings of a fruit vendor in a bustling Venice piazza. I picked up an apple and put it back in its place. She called over from a nearby perch but I couldn’t understand what she said.
When I went for a peach, she was suddenly by my side, like a looming afternoon storm shadow. She slapped my hand and replaced the peach to the pile.
Non toccare, she said. Don’t touch.
Now I never touch, only look. I wait for my turn, listening to the chatter of those around me. For many Italians, the daily shopping excursion is an opportunity for exercise and to socialize, like the daily habit among many rural Americans of picking up your mail at the P.O. Box.
Of course I stick out here with my Ray Bans and goofy American attire. But customers are curious. Some want to know where I’m from, what I am doing so far from home. When I tell them in my stuttering Italian about my grandfather and his descendants, they smile and nod.
Of course they know the Glionna clan here. Everybody does.
When it’s my turn, I point and murmur something about my choice, and I take whatever I get. Sometimes, there’s a proverbial lemon in a clutch of apples, something a bit shriveled or bruised, but I use my kitchen knife to cut away the bad parts.
Va bene.
It’s all a brave new culinary world. Sure, I do my share of the shopping back home, but I don’t actually plan meals. I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a numbskull in the kitchen. My wife is a great cook and who am I to stand in the way of culinary brilliance?
At first, I imagined that I would take most of my meals with relatives or at local restaurants. When in Rome, after all, it’s better to eat what the Romans cook you. While my invitations for home-cooking are frequent, I often find myself resorting to a dinnertime slab of greasy pizza or oily panini on the go.
Sure, it’s all heavenly delicious. But if I want to continue to fit my growing girth through the door of my small apartment, I know I’ll have to take action: Eat more salads and vegetables, with smaller portions of pasta and less bread.
And here’s what it’s like for an American in a tiny southern Italian town where your family has it roots: Your relatives are a vital part of the community. One cousin was a longtime firefighter here. Another runs an auto repair garage in town with his son.
And here’s the best part: I make regular stops at a specialty store called La Bottega del Gusto, the Taste Shop, operated by my second-cousin Vincenzo Glionna, a tall, affable man, who was a fixture here until his death a few years go.
Vincenzo had this lovely habit of repeating the ongoing status of his affairs.
Al posto, he’d say in a sing-song voice. Tutto al posto. Everything is in its place.
Hearing that refrain was like a familiar music in my ears. Years ago, when I first brought my father to Pomarico, I sent him inside Vincenzo’s market, while I waited outside the window, videotaping the encounter. My father pointed at this and that as Vincenzo stood behind the counter, looking baffled at this stranger who spoke little Italian.
Finally, he looked up and spotted me, a familiar face because I had visited the town years before, and suddenly realized the identity of this man before him. At that, he threw up his hands and ran around the counter to embrace my father, his first cousin.
It was a sign of familial Italian warmth that still evokes my emotions. But now Vincenzo is gone (RIP, cugino) and the shop is run buy his son Nico and his widow Irena.
The other day, Irena takes me under her wing with a mother’s care, pointing out the ingredients I’ll need to make a mean starter-pasta dish. She brushes past packages of spaghetti, fusilli, fettuccini and farfalle, leading me to a package of fresh locally-made maccheroncini stored in a small cooler.
She selects some pecorino cheese with some finely-rated Parmesan, offering instructions of which cheese goes best with each dish.
I leave with a bagful of olives, pasta, cheese and — this beginner’s cooking set — a bottle of tomato sauce. I hope to eventually be able to whip up my own salsa di pomodoro, or tomato sauces, like the locals do. (A man can dream, can’t he?)
Now I’m trying my luck in my tiny kitchen making passable dishes, even if they're prepared by a culinary cretin such as myself. (Still, I quickly blunder, once leaving open a bottle of vinegar to find it the next day full of tiny fruit flies.)
I hurry home that day, my shopping bag full of freshness, hoping to catch the pannettiere just down the flight of steps from my one-bedroom apartment before the start of the southern Italian reposino, the lovely hour or so after lunch when you rest and recharge your batteries for the remainder of the day.
As I walk the street, I hear the words.
Eh Americano!
I turn to see my 19-year-old cousin Gabriel at the wheel of a passing car on his usual tour around town. He stops, we chat and he moves on.
And I feel at home, not quite yet a local, but getting closer.
And so it begins, as I notch down my fast-paced life to the more leisurely slow-cooked way of the small southern Italian town where my grandfather was born.