In our house every Monday was chore day. It was a day of absolute boredom and tedium. During the summer I knew to get out of the house and find somewhere, anywhere to go. The danger of being caught inside on chore day would ultimately end up with me unwillingly cleaning my room. Okay in complete honesty it was a day of me pretending to clean my room. I would in the troughs of cleaning find something far more interesting and get completely distracted and never actually pick any thing up. There was one Monday a month that was a completely different experience. The Monday that we would go grocery shopping. For the most part I grew up in a home with only one parent working and that parent got paid once a month. This created what I would consider a budgeting nightmare. My mother managed to work this out with a very methodical and a most unspontaneous solutions. She planned the meals an entire month in advance. With a ruler she would draw a calendar on a piece of paper and write down what protein we would be eating on that specific evening. After a complete list was made the close examination of Monday grocery ads commenced. I don't know if she still looks at grocery ads on Monday but back then she read them like a stockbroker checking his mutual funds. She would make of list of all the grocery stores and then write exactly what we needed to get at each one. At the time there were 5 grocery stores in the area. We went to Big E and later Cub Foods(both precursors to the warehouse superstores of today), Safeway, Mr D's, Kroger and Marsh. With lists, calendars and coupons cut the three of us piled in to the big brown station wagon. They don't call those things grocery getter's for nothing. My mother had to have the strength of ten men to be able to pile a 6 year old and an 11 year old into a car and drive them to 5 grocery stores. We were good kids don't get me wrong but a 6 hour grocery shopping trip is enough to send any well behaving child into a tantrum worthy of an Oscar. Every month she filled the back of a full sized station wagon with groceries to last a month. Managing to plan meals out in a month really isn't the jaw-dropping feat. What was truly amazing is my mom was cooking from Bon Appetit. She wasn't putting Hamburger Helper on the table she was preparing fairly high end cooking for 1985 Indiana.
I would challenge anyone these days to plan that far in advance and not change the plan for a month. No thoughts of "it is Tuesday and I really don't feel like ham steak how about chicken?" Full commitment to the calendar is required of the built in leftover days are shot to hell. Now a days people,(my parents included), shop in a more meal by meal style of going to the store once a day. People seem to have come to appreciate fresh ingredients and since every one doesn't have the luxury of frequent local farm markets we have come to appreciate fresh goods. While I am sure this has had some impact on the way we shop it seems that we have also adopted new shopping patterns because we want what we want when we want it. I can't plan a meal 4 days in advance much less 4 weeks in advance because inevitably one of these two things will happen. First I will get a craving for something very specific about 3 hours before I want to have dinner and will have no motivation to cook whatever is in the fridge. If I don't get some whimsical and outlandish idea of what I want to cook I will get lazy and decide I don't want to cook because it will mess up the kitchen. So I have decided that buying staples of the pantry and then deciding every night at the store is the best way for me to shop. Sounds like an easy proposition since I work at a grocery store but I make nothing in my life that simple. By time I finish my shift I no longer want to shop. I have been working around the product for the entire day and 10 hours later I am either not interested or completely indecisive about the food. So off I go to other stores a few hours later and I walk up and down aisle trying to get inspired. Most days this works but I have a unique and time consuming fascination with grocery stores and I can spend over and hour just trying to find 5 ingredients for a simple chicken dish. Most people that I see buying groceries don't seem to shop by month or by the day they have a more easy to manage once a week shopping trip. I don't have the discipline to cook that way and I like being in the stores and looking at the products too much for that to ever happen. I like grocery stores the way some women like shoes and handbags.
My parents will probably never go back to planning a month in advance and it is better this way. If she had to gather her 27 year old and 32 year old into a car and go grocery shopping for 6 hours today she would be as exhausted as she must have been 20 years ago. We are still prone to stellar performances though they would now be more worthy a news debate show than an Oscar.
