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Smoked ham

The last 5 days of the no-supermarket challenge were scuppered by spending them in Prague where at least for the first couple of days, I defaulted to Tesco because I knew where it was and what it did.

As the days have gone past, I have discovered where the small shops are – there are refreshingly large numbers of minimarkets, even in central Prague, though I suspect it will not  long before they too will be replaced  or outdone by Tesco Express stores as in the UK.

For the 25 days while I was in London, however, I accomplished my no-supermarket challenge without a hitch, and it was one of the most satisfying and creatively stimulating things I’ve done in a long time.   I learned a lot along the way, including:

• Forcing one small change in any area of your life seems to have a knock-on effect in your thinking in other areas.
• A small creative challenge is as good as, if not better, than a big one, because it’s do-able.
• Shopping at supermarkets is fundamentally a depressing and numbing experience that stifles original, creative thought about the miniature challenges of everyday life.
• The mind of the supermarket becomes implanted in your brain. Taking yourself out of them for a while is a liberating experience, and opens your eyes to other opportunities.
• Genuine, friendly interactions with people in local shops make every day that much more pleasant. Scripted, enforced interactions with supermarket cashiers are a source of stress.

Several people have asked me whether I will continue to avoid supermarkets once the challenge is over. The answer is a resounding yes, not because I want to live in a permanent state of protest against them, but simply because living without them has been a joyful experience that has added many positive things to my daily life, and removed many negative ones.

Briki from the household department at Kotva

I finally threw away the džezva that I bought in a department store in Belgrade in 1979 last year. My recent discovery of Lebanese coffee at Daily Fresh in Tooting means I need another one, though it should really be a rakweh. The Greek friend I’m staying with tells me it’s a called briki in Greek. I bought this one at Kotva in Prague, where it’s also called a džezva. This is making me slightly sentimental for the subject of my first (unfinished) PhD which was lexical variation in the cooking vocabulary of Serbo-Croat. Really.

Promotion at Sainsburys, Colliers Wood

It doesn’t matter how much you push the idea of healthy eating, low-fat options, fresh ingredients, 5-a-day fruit and vegetables and a well-balanced diet, if in the end you offer pizza and ice-cream half price on a sign this big before you get into the shop, then that says a lot about your values and what you are actually promoting.

You could argue that they’re just doing good deals on what ‘people’ want. But in fact, without supermarkets, ‘people’ wouldn’t think “I know, I’ll have a pizza’ every time they thought about food.  If you’re looking for a reason that there’s an obesity epidemic, this may be a good place to start.

Lemon shortbread biscuits

In the spirit of my non-wasteful ambitions of recent posts, i just had to finish up some butter and a couple of lemons, so I made some lemon shortbread biscuits, and used up the end of a bag of ground almonds as well as semolina that the recipe called for. It took minutes, and though I say it myself, they were delicious. They also made four people that bit happier today.

That wasn’t quite it though. I also had a lime, two lemons and a pot of double cream about to expire. I quickly whipped up a lemon ice cream, adding the end of a bottle of rosé instead of the water in the recipe.

That’s it – absolutely nothing wasted this week, and a bunch of delights in the process.

Watermelons in Nokta by Tooting Bec

One unmistakeable effect of this no-supermarket challenge is that I simply don’t waste food anymore. Yesterday was the last chance to use up a lot of things I had left from the beginning of the week – onions, peppers, carrots, half a kohlrabi, mild green chilis, some quark. I made a big mixed vegetable curry out of all of it, using the quark to thicken it (something I’d never thought of doing before, but it works like a dream).

I probably wouldn’t have done that before. I would have looked at it and wondered what to do with it, because it doesn’t fit into the food-framing that Sainsburys does for you: it must involve meat, particularly chicken breasts, and vegetables are an accompaniment, not a feature (at Tooting, for example, meat is near the front door, vegetables are at the back).  What’s more, there must always be a luxury ingredient, and you shouldn’t have to work too hard.

Now, I’m not saying any of this is necessarily explicit or Sainsbury’s fault, but it’s  what walking round Sainsbury’s does to me. After 3 weeks of not going there, I feel like I’ve got my life back.  I’m also aware that sometimes I’d just go to a supermarket and get more stuff that was easy to make into a meal, rather than work out what to do with what I’d got.  There’s something insidious about the way that celebrity chefs, magazines, food journalism and food retail all work together to create a kind of a food-porn that reconstructs  what cooking and eating means for us and sells it back to us as if it was what we wanted all along. It takes effort and definitive action to step outside it and think for yourself.

I’d never tried harissa before a few months ago, and only really heard of it about a year ago. I made a special trip to Waitrose once to get a jar so I could try it, since I’d given up finding it anywhere else. I tried it, I liked it. It’s one of those magic ingredients that you don’t need much of to lift even the dullest food out of its torpor.

Since avoiding supermarkets for the last 22 days, I’ve discovered that in fact my local shop, Daily Fresh, has loads of harissa, and not at yuppie prices. What’s more, it has the the wonderful brand name of Le Phare du Cap Bon. Who could resist?