Lockdown food shopping

As I can’t see enough detail to be able to scan the shelves and isles or read the labels and prices in shops, food shopping on my own generally means using familiar shops where I at least know the layout. I rely on a mixture of picking things up from the shelves and using a small (powerful) magnifier to read the labels, and  asking for help to locate specific  items if I can’t find them. Generally though getting around myself by using my small amount of sight to identify areas and products by their colour and shape, checking them against my memory of what the products should look like close-up has worked well for me all my life. 

 

While this is laborious and not always easy, it does enable me to shop independently, spontaneously and fairly privately… and while I’m good at moaning here about how difficult things are, I enjoy food shopping as it is an integral part of my  love of cooking and eating.

 

Now though, with COVID-19, I find my whole relationship to shopping has been shaken. I can’t go to a shop and rummage around in the way that I’m used to. I can’t go to the cheese section  and pick up each piece, focussing my magnifier within an inch of my face to read its label, or pick up every bottle of wine or beer in order to identify it. I have to either take pot luck (going with what I think I’m picking up or know that I recognise) or shop through others. I  either order food through neighbours shopping for each other on our street, or ask for shop workers to give me assistance to find each item. While no judgements have been passed about anything that I’ve bought, I do experience it as somewhat exposing to share all my secret food desires and purchases with others – there are some spontaneous purchases that I wouldn’t even want me to know about.

 

There is a popular lockdown commentary about how shopping trips have become too fleeting and almost panicked, without the necessary attention paid to their purchases. I experience this semi- panic too and it is further layered with the inability to scan the shelves and isles to see what is around.

 

 

I’ve noticed that responses to my requests for help finding items that turn out not to be in stock are variously received as straightforward questions and answered accordingly, as accusations or criticisms, as challenges to their sense of key worker martyrdom or eliciting the guilt and shame of their sense of business pride being challenged.

 

While having sympathy for some of the shop keepers and assistants within this current situation, I find myself going through mental summersaults trying to work out the perfect wording that acknowledges their current difficult and potentially risky position but nonetheless wants to (without any criticism implied) ask whether they have any root ginger. Perhaps I will try this out at the weekend:

“Excuse me. I realise that you have limited stock at the moment for obvious reasons, but I can’t see what’s on the shelves, so would you mind telling me what (bread/beers/wines/cheeses/whatever) you have in stock at the moment please?”

 

I will be pissed off if something like that doesn’t work. I’ll keep you posted on the reactions I get.

 

 

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