Going to the store: Italian style

Let’s discuss the Italian food situation. Considering Italians are renowned for their food, you have certain expectations for the Italian supermarket, yeah? It’s all local, and you go to 4 stores for your groceries, each specializing in something, and theres fruit stands. Of course!

Italy is no different than the rest of the Western World--it’s modernizing, slowly. Northern Italy, where I am, is far faster than the South (haven’t been there yet folks, so I can’t inform ya there). Verona, however, has quite the mix. There are supermarkets!! But they are not American supermarkets--our “big” grocery store is about the size of the campus Walgreens. Hah! There IS an actual supermarket, Meijer sized, in the mall (available via 30 minute bus), which I haven’t shopped at because it’s intimidating and sort of like going on an adventure.

I shop at Pam, which is a bit pricier, but close to me. your average grocery store will have about 5 aisles. There are no grocery carts, but rather little baskets, because there is no way you can eat a cart full of food in the few days it will stay fresh--no preservatives here, folks. Meat goes bad extremely fast--at least 3 people have gotten food poisoning for eating meat opened up the day before. There’s an amazing array of cheese, that I haven’t even scratched--mostly soft. No cheddar ANYWHERE. You can get pregrated cheese, but rarely pre shredded. Milk comes in 1 litre sizes, never a gallon. It’s hard to come by fish outside the major supermarkets here, since we’re far from the coast. You can smell the fish from the front of the store, which might be a good thing, or not. American stores in general smell much more sterile than their European counterparts.

There’s some vegetables in store! There are indeed little fruit stands, but more usefully, there’s small grocery stores scattered about with vegetables and other common food items--similar to corner stores. You weigh your vegetables on a machine before you come up front--no cashiers with memorized codes. You put your vegetable on the machine, and there’s tons of numbers (you don’t type it in, that would be too modern, there’s rows of numbers instead), and you find the number on the sign of your vegetable and push the corresponding button. The vegetable weighs, and a sticker prints out with the price and vegetable name--it’s pretty cool, and the closest Italians get to the self check-out line.
Certain vegetables are more prevalent here: artichokes, lettuces and cabbage, oranges, and fennel appear to be the most popular. Fennel tastes like watery licorice.

There are lots of cereals and yogurts and fresh pastas--including pasta from Barilla, which I find hilarious. Lots of the cereals are English crossovers--I have “Special Flakes” (special k/corn flakes) in my pantry, and Natalie has a bizarre Honey Nut Cherrios thing going on. Similarly, you can find American candy (Milky Way is called Mars though, like it was in America originally), gum, and Pringles(only seen sour cream and onion, however) and such, but it’s expensive and the selection is poor.

The “carb” aisle is intense. There are lots of crossaints filled with marmelade or chocolate--to be honest, you can get anything filled with chocolate (mostly Nutella) over here, including cereal (they have like Koala yummies cereal for breakfast, and I am suspicious). There’s a bunch of types of cookies--frollini are chocolate chip cookies. Stelle are chocolate cookies with white stars on them. They look just as manufactured as American prepared food, no worries! There are tons of fresh breads, which are cheap, but also sliced bread. The main snacking foods are not crackers and chips (though they are available), but rather long crispy bread sticks, or small circles of denser crunchy dough.

There’s an insane amount of Nutella over here. You have your store brand Nutella, one or two knock off Nutellas, and then ACTUAL Nutella, in multiple sizes: 3 mini tubs for taking with you on the go (.67 euro), small size nutella (in a glass jar, 1.67 euro), and big nutella (the kind you find in the US, 3.67 euro)--the economy size of Nutella my mom got me at CostCo is yet to be found, but any store that sells crepes has a HUGE jar the size of a standard folder sitting out.

Most people buy carbonated (frizz ante) water, in HUGE bottles, though the tap water is fine. Eggs are not refrigerated--they sit on the shelf. Becca confirms that in Greece, it’s the same way. I’m still skeptical of this, and refuse to buy them (same with milk, but that’s me being paranoid). I refuse to buy the horse meat, a typical Veronese dish, either. Some things are just too weird.