A shopping cart is a window into your life

Waiting in line at the grocery store, my eyes fell on the collection of items picked out by the woman behind me. Her cart emanated good health, brimming with various shades of green: leeks, broccoli, some other leafy bundle I did not recognize. A bag of lentils and a few cans of garbanzo beans complemented the palette with beiges and browns. As she laid out the items on the conveyer belt, I could not spot a single unhealthy item.

Meanwhile, the cashier scanned my selections: hot dogs, a box of apple-flavored Cheerios, a second box of apple-flavored Cheerios. Multiple boxes of Mac and Cheese.

My eyes darted between the two sets of groceries, and I felt a tinge of dismay even though I, too, had a few healthful items: a bag of apples, two avocados, a bag of frozen strawberries.

How did she manage to resist the temptations of half-prepared meals, frozen food and, most baffling of all, crunchy snacks in brightly colored packages?

Before I had children, my food cart looked different than it does today. It was filled with fresh produce, yogurt and berries, big bags of salad, radishes and peppers. But as my husband and I added more kids to our family — and as those kids became toddlers — time grew more compressed, and shortcuts, particularly related to food, became more and more appealing. That’s when Ritz Crackers and cereal started becoming staples in my shopping cart; then chips and pretzels, and eventually, the inevitable — chicken nuggets and boxed Mac and Cheese. I continued, as I do now, to diligently offer my children cucumbers and blueberries, but marketing campaigns seemed to leave me powerless — Mac and Cheese would somehow always win over my best intentions.

I followed food accounts on Instagram and once called my pediatrician wondering why my daughter only wanted to eat crackers. “Well, what kind of food do you offer her, Mom?” the pediatrician asked. I felt judged. It felt like I had fallen into a common trap of American parenthood, and there was no way out.

I didn’t grow up eating typical American kid food. Growing up in Ukraine in the 1990s, I had a mom who cooked everything from scratch. Our typical dinners included mashed potatoes, pork, homemade soups and, on special occasions, rotisserie chicken. Back then, in the early post-Soviet days, filling up a shopping cart with food was a foreign concept: large supermarkets didn’t come to Ukraine until the early 2000s, and grocery shopping involved mostly going to small markets and bakeries. If you didn’t get there fast enough, the stores would sell out of popular items, leaving empty shelves. My dad would bring me a bundle of bananas and a jar of Nutella when he returned from his business trips abroad; these were the special delicacies I looked forward to as a kid. Now, I throw those items in my American shopping cart without thinking twice.

Only later, in high school, I experienced the joy of making a meal in exactly two minutes. Nearly every day after school, I made a bowl of instant ramen, which I could do all by myself. When McDonald’s came to Ukraine in 1997, a whole new world opened up for me and my friends — we could quickly eat without returning home after school, and continue hanging out for hours.

Then I arrived in America. As a student at Brigham Young University, the abundance of food in the cafeteria — albeit not always healthy — felt like a luxury: the waffles, the ice cream, the chicken cordon bleu. All of a sudden, when it came to food variety, I had a wealth of choices, something I hadn’t experienced growing up. And these choices have only expanded since then, though not always to the benefit of my health, and that of my family.

Now, in the checkout lane at my local grocery store, my feelings of envy and admiration shifted to curiosity. I had to know what motivated this woman’s excellent curation of groceries. Was it personal discipline, or a genuine preference for nutritious salads and lentils?

“I really admire your grocery selection,” I said to the woman, who appeared to be in her late twenties. “It’s so healthy.” By then, an awareness of how awkward my attention was began to dawn on me, but I had no choice but to continue my inquiry. “Do you cook a lot?” I asked. She seemed flattered and smiled. “I do a lot of meal prep,” she said as the cashier scanned my box of Frosted Flakes.

In the days following this interaction, I thought about all the revelations that both of our shopping carts contained that day.

But these revelations are not just about our food preferences. At the grocery store, our shopping cart is a bit like a window into our life: how busy we are, what we can and can’t afford, things we prioritize, the culture we come from, and one that I can especially relate to these days, whether there are picky little eaters at home.

To be sure, there are always some confounding selections that make this glimpse into another’s life more opaque: the man with 5 family-size boxes of Cheerios in his cart, the woman whose cart contained 100 bottles of Snapple ice tea. I dared not ask the reasons.

Sometimes we also curate our cart with an aspiration to eat more healthfully, to cut down on the junk. In that way, our carts are a little bit like our Instagram accounts — a mix of who we’ve been, who we are and who we want to become. But there is usually a reason, and even a story, behind every choice in our shopping cart — a decision informed by time constraints, our background, budget, or pure whim and curiosity. The chicken nuggets keep my younger kids full, and the pre-prepared snacks help keep them entertained while I work. And that occasional bag of apples that may sit in the fridge for a few weeks — that is my attempt, and tangible reminder, to do better.

One day, I hope that my cart, as well as my kids’ dinner plates, will be brimming with leafy things they will actually eat. Meanwhile, I will be lurking over my fellow shoppers’ grocery carts for inspiration. You can recognize mine by the Cheerios, and the four boxes of Mac and Cheese.