Food shopping. Most paradoxical emotion-inducing exercise I have to deal with in my tough life as a student. Firstly there is never a good time to go. Supermarkets are always busy; have you ever tried to squeeze between a precarious stack of toilet roll and a mum-trolley-small-child combination? Impossible. And you can’t go before you eat because you’re too hungry and risk purchasing enough food to feed a small colony of dinosaurs for three days. On the other hand, you can’t go after you’ve eaten because very often you (although maybe just me) are then too full to even contemplate looking at food, and come away having purchased only a bag of lettuce and can of diet coke.
So, having established there is never a good time to go to a supermarket, I recently tried my hand at online food shopping. Tescos claim you can shop until they drop. Well I can tell you one thing; I may not have been physically tired, but my brain was well on its way to melt-down and I was just about ready to launch myself out of my bedroom window after this experience. You have to know precisely what you want in order to search for it and add it to your virtual basket. So after two and a half painstaking hours of imagining I was walking round a supermarket in order to remember what food I wanted to buy, I finally had a full basket/the cost was beginning to soar, at which point I decided to call it a day. I selected my delivery slot, entered all my personal details, created various accounts, almost blocked my online banking in the process, only for the site to crash and the contents of my basket to disappear. So back to reality and a three-dimensional supermarket, whereupon I decided it wasn’t so bad after all. I went armed, ready with my super-duper bags for life to make the walk home as pain free as possible. Had a surprisingly successful shop, basket was moderately healthy and not too heavy. Next stop, check out. PAINFUL, but quick, and if you’re paying by card, the experience is soon forgotten, like removing a plaster, getting out of bed in the morning or the first shot of vodka of the night. Last hurdle, or so I thought, was getting home, which, with the aid of my serious bagz 4 lyf was made relatively easy. I will not even begin to discuss the trauma of unpacking your shopping once purchased and home. But it just so turns out, that the last and quite unexpected hurdle was the most challenging of the lot. I was caught off-guard, and suddenly, despite my gold-medal deserving performance thus far, my shoelace came un-done, and needless to say, it was all downhill from there. I had forgotten to check any of the sell by dates, which meant that after all my hard work of budgeting and finding healthy food that would last me a week or two, I had to eat almost half of what I had bought by the following day. I had a difficult task on my hands. That night I had a meal consisting of an entire pot of hummus, a packet of thinly sliced ‘chicken’ (god knows what it actually is), a loaf of bread, five Fox’s chocolate bars, a bag of potatoes and four pints of milk. I decided that I could leave the mushrooms for an extra day.
So what is the moral of this story? There are many; don’t go food shopping a) before eating, b) after eating, c) when mums are there, or anyone else in fact, d) online and e) without bags for life. And when you’re there, think to the future; about paying – quickly- leaving –quickly- getting home –quickly- unpacking –quickly. But not so quickly that you forget to check the sell by dates.
