Taking a Little Walk to Trader Joe's
I promise this isn't a foray into foodblogging (or is it?).
Sad to announce on this beautiful Long Island morning that I’ve been influenced.
In the same way that I accidentally forced my Instagram algorithm to only show me cat videos for about six months, I’ve been watching like, a trillion recipe reels to the point where food accounts were the only thing showing up on my search page for a few weeks.
(I probably seem like an old fart millenial for using Instagram Reels and not TikTok but goddammit I refuse to be sucked into something so purposefully and obviously addictive. Instead I will use the knock-off, tyvm.)
What’s the point of this, Kate? And what does it have to do with walking to Trader Joe’s? Well, for weeks I’ve been staring at painstakingly edited videos of charming young women making huge bowls of salads. Salads with shredded cabbage, with beans, with homemade lemon dressings, with shaved carrots, with crumbled cheese, all of it so green and fresh looking. And I decided yesterday if I didn’t have a salad like that within two hours I would fucking die.
One of the best parts about once again living at home is how accessible everything is for those of us without cars (or, uh, licenses). I mean, I still need to rely on public transportation and/or the goodwill of my friends and family to get anywhere beyond my hometown, but part of the reason I didn’t learn to drive in high school was because I didn’t need a car to get anywhere I absolutely needed to go. Even if I could usually rely on someone to kindly give me a lift, I knew I could walk if it came to it: to school, to the library, to our many Starbucks and Dunkin’s, and, of course, to the grocery store.
When I lived in Allentown, and then when I lived in Indiana, a trip to the grocery store became an affair. Something I had to plan for, both with a list and a travel (or delivery) plan. That’s not the case when I’m at home. At all.
Yesterday morning I walked to Trader Joe’s because it was beautiful outside, and I felt like it. By the time I got to the store’s parking lot, I hadn’t even finished one play-through of Hozier’s new EP. I bought my greens and my veggies and my chickpeas and a few other things for good measure—it’s Trader Joe’s, after all. You can’t leave that place without trying a new snack. I paid, and I put Hozier back on, and I was home again in less than ten minutes, a huge salad with homemade dressing for me and my mom on the table thirty minutes after that.
I even made quinoa!
It would be easy to make the end of this quick entry about the salad itself, but that’s not really the thing I’m “liking” today (though it was very fucking good, especially with goat cheese, and I will certainly be having more of it for lunch). It was the walk itself that was so pleasant; it was an impulse immediately fulfilled, and only made possible by the immense privilege of working from home and living in a walkable town.
(Even if there are way too many strip malls and not enough trees for my liking, but that’s a problem for another day.)
There’s something immensely pleasurable for me, personally, about walking into Trader Joe’s with only a loose plan. Part of that pleasure comes from the independence of easily being able to get to the grocery store using only my feet. Part of that pleasure is the weather itself; summer is arriving in fits and starts, and the sunshine makes me actually want to leave my house for that little TJ’s walk. Mostly the pleasure comes from knowing I’m about to fill my body with good food that I chose myself, whether it’s a salad or that trendy cauliflower gnocchi I discovered like three years after it was actually trendy or their strawberry mochi ice cream, which I am now absolutely obsessed with.
Everyone deserves an accessible, affordable grocery store within walking distance of their home. I don’t think that’s a radical thought, even if it is slightly impossible in rural areas. I know how lucky I am that I can just up and decide to walk to a local grocery store on a whim, and the politics of the situation aren’t lost on me. There are actually more like four (possibly more?) grocery stores within a reasonable walking distance from my house, and even more that are less than a ten minute drive away. That’s my experience on Long Island, and you can be sure that it was not my experience in Indiana.
But the joy of my Trader Joe’s walk goes beyond buying healthy groceries. It’s the sun-bleached sidewalk, the Hozier playing in my headphones, the breeze that smells faintly of sea water (but mostly of gas station), the ache in my shoulder from carrying all my groceries home. Walking to the grocery store means using my body, feeling the actual environment around me—even when that environment is mostly a lot of concrete, pavement, and a few trees with their middles chopped away to make room for the telephone lines. Being out in the world, and then returning home to feed the body that’s part of that world.
Maybe it’s been a long winter. Maybe it’s been a long pandemic, too. But I’ve been taking my little solo walks to this Trader Joe’s for over ten years, and I’ve always felt the same way. And I hope I always will.