What made me & Maggie happy about the Food Emporium on Avenue D is how crappy it is. The aisles are too narrow for carts to pass & you have to figure out a way to get out if you didn't buy anything—an old anti-shoplifter's trick. They pretty much don't have any products you would want & not too many you would buy even in a pinch. It's like the old days in the neighborhood, when all the supermarkets sold scrapple, fowl, packages of chicken hearts, & other amazing products that we bought because it was meat for cheap. (Cooking a fowl or chicken hearts was another story, an adventure I didn't master. Cookbooks? Never crossed my mind. I thought cookbooks were for fancy.) We took a little trip down memory lane yesterday just a few blocks east. A Food Emporium anywhere else in Manhattan would stock very different stuff & be laid out differently. I'm not advocating for them to be awful, just enjoyed being launched back into the '70s, when everyone around here was equally poor, the bodegas had dusty cans of condensed milk & probably were all fronts for pot stores, & we were left alone by the city. It was benign anarchy. While I'm happy to have vegetarian sushi a block away (for example), the solidarity of want is gone.
Loading…}