Cooking for one: the grocer's point of view
So she comes in, just another customer, just another one I am ready for before she is ready for me. I see her looking all over the display, not knowing what it is she wants, yet another undecided Thursday evening shopper. I ask: „Next, please!” with a slightly harsher tone than I intended to give off, and she presents to me a bag of multicereal buns. She isn’t even sure how many she put in there. Then she babbles something about ribbons. That was the best part. She wants pasta in „ribbons”. Ribbons, I say? No, actually I didn’t even repeat after her, it just seemed too ridiculous. So I show her the pasta, left from right, as she struggles to redefine what she wants. It turns out she wanted the bow-ties. Even I wouldn’t call them bow-ties, but „ribbons” certainly doesn’t help. I suppose they do have an Italian name, farfalle or something like that. All that stuff is Italian anyway. Then she wants tomato sauce, I think to myself, hey, I wonder what you are having for dinner tonight, but she doesn’t know which one. I talk to the other staff just to try and make her less uncomfortable as she squints to make out the ingredients of the various types of sauces that are piled on top of each other on the shelves behind my back. She asks for „that one”, pointing clumsily a bit to my left. Oh, so you want concentrated tomato?, I ask with a resolutely doubtful tone. She gives me a blank look as if to ask: „That’s what I pointed to?” and asks for something „more like” pasta sauce. She doesn’t want Bolognese because there may be meat in it, I don’t care, so I tell her that even if there is any, it would only be traces - traces of fake meat, I add in my head. But she seems bothered, must be another one of those New Age vegetarians, so she asks for the regular Spaghetti sauce. Finally! The woman knows what she wants. 4.40, 7.80, 4.20 and 2.50 and you’ve got yourself your solitary dinner, plus some bread and cheese for breakfast, lady. Next, please!
