Posted by fum on Friday, May 19, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

Here in Sicily, going grocery shopping is a completely different experience than it is in America. First of all, it is more common to frequent specialty shops rather than going to a supermarket to purchase all your goods. As I’ve found in Cefalu, there are shops that specialize in meat, cheese, wine, vegetables, and anything that your heart could desire. Not only are the ingredients fresher since the shops specialize in these goods, but they also end up being cheaper than buying them from a supermarket. It is more common to go grocery shopping more often here, say a few times a week, to ensure that the foods purchased remain fresh. I feel that there are less preservatives used on all the foods here, but the drawback to this is that the foods have to be eaten quickly or they will go bad within a day or two. I discovered this the first time I tried to buy strawberries; though I left half the carton in the fridge, they still became moldy and inedible within 24 hours.

There is one shop here similar to an American supermarket which is called the SuperDeco, but even this shop has some key differences. The size of the supermarket is much smaller than I am used to, and it sells a limited amount of stuff. One key difference that I noticed were that there were much less packaged foods offered in the store compared to America, in which packaged goods make up the majority of the store. While in America there are tons of different types of granola bars offered in the snack aisle, in the SuperDeco I struggled to find any granola bars, and I only ended up finding two different options to choose from. There is also a whole aisle just dedicated to pasta, where you can find both common packaged kinds and specialty kinds.

One key difference that I learned the hard way is the process of buying fruits and vegetables here. In the SuperDeco they have the price per kilogram instead of per pound like in America, but that’s a small difference. The thing that I discovered was that they also have a scale that weighs the amount of fruit or vegetables you have, then prints out a sticker with the weight and price. It’s quite easy, once someone showed me how to use it. I simply had to put the bag on the scale and select what kind of food I had gotten, then it printed out a receipt with the exact cost of the fruits or vegetables. I think that this is an ingenious method, because this way there is no mystery in the price of the produce and you know exactly what you have to pay. While in America there are scales to weigh out your purchases, there is often no way to know the exact price of what you’re buying.

While the convenience of American supermarkets is nice, it just can’t compare to the freshness of the ingredients that are found in the Italian shops here. It may take more time to visit each shop, but the lack of preservatives and relatively cheap prices encourage a healthier, budget-friendly diet.

The pasta aisle of the grocery store: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0f8fj2A_7mqdDRWQl9lV1lCbEE/view?usp=sharing

The simplest yet smartest invention: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0f8fj2A_7mqNWpmVkR5bmJqR1E/view?usp=sharing