Grocery Store Nightmare

Sometimes in life you don’t really understand how good you have it. I experienced this earlier in the evening when Kari and I decided to make our monthly trip to the grocery store. We went to the Giant Eagle in Lakewood, Ohio. I was absolutely disgusted by what I saw. I feel so bad for the people who go there and think they are getting something of quality. And it isn’t cheap by any means.

The Super Bowl set up was in full swing. About 100# of ‘hard as a rock avocados’ sat next to dried guacamole mix in pouch. Really? There was a fair selection of mushrooms….. if you wanted ‘dried out been sitting on the shelf the past week’ kind of mushrooms. All the green herbs, which are ridiculously expensive, were either yellow or brown yet shelved above tubes of herb puree. The parsnips and carrots I actually touched were so flaccid I don’t believe anyone would actually buy them. They are root vegetables not marshmallows.

The seafood was even worse. The oysters where all dried out and open. If the shrimp wasn’t frozen it looked either dehydrated or slimy. Salmon was all the tail cuts, which are not prime seafood. The rest of the case was full of things in various shapes and sizes that where coated in bread crumbs. What a dishonor to seafood.

I understand that breadcrumbs are cheap, but half the stuff in the meat case consisted of a good amount of breadcrumbs as well. The meat was too red to be true. The ‘filet mignon’ they are charging twenty some dollars a pound for was cut into steaks, but completely un-trimmed of any sliverskin and cut at an angle making the steak look quite big, but not so thick. Is this what people want I have to ask myself. There were a few rib-eyes out and it looked as If someone pushed all the fat out of them and they were all loose, flabby, and full of holes. Amazingly none of the meat was covered yet it was more red than anything we ever get at the restaurant in cryo.

In the end we found one ripe avocado (nobody else in Lakewood is eating a ripe avocado cause I think I squeezed them all) some cherry tomatoes that won’t last more than 2 days, the only stiff cucumber in the place, four bananas, some cold cuts and bread. What an eye opener. It turned my stomach and it makes me more worrisome than ever that people don’t have a grasp of what quality food should be.