Making The Grocery List

This column originally appeared on Sunday, Aug. 22, 2010

Every year since 1998, Beloit College in Wisconsin has been issuing what its faculty refers to as the “mindset list.” Compiled on this list are touchstones that the older faculty and staff should take into account when considering the place where the incoming class of freshman is coming from, culturally speaking.

You might have run up against some of these yourselves when thinking about the 18-year-olds you encounter. You know, that they have never used, or perhaps even seen, a rotary telephone. That the phrase “don’t touch that dial” when it comes to a television has no meaning for them. That they’ve always lived their life in the shadow of AIDS, and that Bruce Springsteen has always been older than their parents.

This year’s list includes reminders that few in the Class of 2014 have ever written in cursive, and if they send mail it’s not through the U.S. Postal Service. To them, John McEnroe had never played professional tennis, and Korean cars are as commonplace as a VW. They have never known a nation called Czechoslovakia, and Vietnam has always been a place that sends shoes to the U.S.

Two things.

First, I had my chance to be a proud member of the Beloit College Class of 1979, but passed on that option to attend Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., instead, and that decision led me to meet people who grew up in Chester County, who suggested I move here after a year in Kentucky and get a job on a local newspaper which led, ultimately, to me writing this weekly column. Feeling blessed, are you?

Second, what strikes me about the way the world has changed since the days before the 1990s is not what’s gone, but what has arrived. And by that, I mean the things you find on grocery store shelves.

The members of the Class of 2014 have never known a time when there was not salsa on the shelves at their neighborhood supermarket. And not just salsa, but mild, medium, or hot salsa. Or Roasted Chipotle salsa. Or Roasted Tomato salsa. Or Roasted Sweet Pepper salsa. Garlic and Line, Santa Fe, Black Bean and Corn, all salsas -- and those are just the store brands.

To the freshman, there has always been a choice to make between reduced fat and natural peanut butter, honey roast or hazelnut (with skim milk and cocoa). They can get prune butter, maple butter or pumpkin butter, and no one is going to look askance at them in the checkout lane.

No world has existed for them when there were not 11 different types of baked beans on the shelf, or three different types of Spaghetti Os, one “plus calcium.” They have always been given the option of Jasmati, Texmati, Basmati, Arborio or brown rice -- that is if they were sick of buying couscous. They have always had 14 flavors of Rice-a-Roni, and could not care less that it is the “San Francisco Treat.”

My mother took my sisters and I shopping every Friday at the Keller’s IGA store on Ludlow Avenue in the Clifton neighborhood of Cincinnati and we came home each week with pizza in a box from Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. The kit could make two pies, one round and one rectangular, and we loved each and every slice of it. You go to a grocery store now and go to the pasta aisle and here is what you will find: Four Cheese, Roasted Garlic, Diavolo, Puttanesca, Bolognese, Tomato and Basil, Spicy Tomato and Basil, Traditional Sweet Basil, Vodka and Pomodoro tomato sauce. Not to mention fusilli, rotelle, rigatoni, mini-rigatoni, penne, penne rigate, farfalle, tortiglioni, cappellini, linguine, and regular and thin spaghetti. And if the class of 2014 walked in a store and didn’t see those pasta items in regular and organic whole wheat, they would wonder how in the world the store could possibly stay in business.

Don’t get me started on the olive bar.

This is not meant to be one of those tiresome “when I was a kid” rants about how much better things were when I was growing up. I thought about what my mother in 1965 would think if she were transported to the new Wegman’s Grocery Store in Great Valley and plopped down with her grocery list. She would likely faint.

I am happy to walk into a store with so much selection, even if I still walk out with a can of plain baked beans and a jar of creamy peanut butter. It’s the kind of change you can believe in.

But maybe I’m wrong. After all, the closet Wegman’s to Beloit is in Erie, 541 miles away.