Best D.C. Supermarket Has Worst D.C. Produce
Is anyone out there familiar with the establishment on the corner of 15th and U, next to Love Cafe, which calls itself Best D.C. Supermarket? I end up shopping there a lot when I don't feel like braving Whole Foods or the 9th Street Giant with the notoriously long lines. The place is always clean and well lit and the employees are very polite. The lines are never long and the place has a surprising selection of ethnic, high-end and specialty foods for a mom and pop store. But, much like Gene Parmesan, this D.C. Supermarket is far from the best.
I don't know where they get their produce, but most of it looks like it fell out of the Columbia Heights Giant and rolled downhill into Best D.C.'s loading dock. Their onions are always cracked and peeling. The bananas are invariably dotted with whole Pangaeas of brown spots and the apples look like they were passed whole through the human digestive tract. I went to buy a pint of mushrooms there the other day and felt like Goldilocks. The first package had an inch of brown water floating in it and the second was full of dirt clumps. It took me three tries to find one that was just right.
Am I the only one whose noticed this? The place is always full of post-Results exercisers buying protein bars, so I'm sure some homo out there has wandered into the produce aisle and been horrified. Judgments aside on this one, I really just want to know what went wrong.
5 comments:
I have a feeling that the post-Results crowd at your grocery store is buying little more than protein bars. I have yet to meet a muscle boy/gym bunny who knows how to prepare a fresh vegetable. If it doesn't come bar-, shake-, or boxed-form, they don't know what to do with it.
Am I being stereotypical? Are you a gym bunny who cooks? Let me know.
haha, very provocative michael...
Yeah, I don't get the crappy produce selection either. They changed owners about a year ago and that's when the much improved selection of high-end and specialty foods appeared, but it seems like they kept the same rejected-produce provider.
I've always liked that store because it's not a chain. Kind of nice to have those places around because they add character to a neighborhood. There's a little mom/pop store next to my building run by this black lady. It has no sign, the hours are never the same and they only sell beer, cigarettes, eggs, bread, and a few odd items like aerosol canned cheese and bad mexican jewelry, but I always go there if I know they have what I would otherwise buy at the Shaw 7-11 or Giant. It's just the principle of the thing.
Michael, are you saying that people who work out are too stupid to prepare vegetables creatively? That may be the case, but maybe they are just too busy going to the gym to cook elaborate vegetable dishes, or like most men, never really learned how to prepare them. Our fast food/bad diet culture and the insularity of our lives (living away from family matriarch/patriarch that might pass on knowledge) makes it easy for us to lose breadth in the art of cooking and understanding of food. I'm always amazed by how the hispanics and even African-Americans that I know have such vegetable-heavy diets. I find them inspiring, and have recently started eating one serving of raw vegetables every day. If I knew how to prepare them in some creative way, I might even eat 2 servings.
Oh, Ben. I never said anything about anyone being stupid. I imagine it's a combination of factors: culture, availability, interest, information, economics, institutions, politics... Intelligence isn't one of them.
The availability of fresh produce is a Catch-22: If you don't have enough people buying it, you can't get enough turn-over to make sure it's all fresh. And if it's not fresh, you don't have people buying it.
Vegetables don't have to be creatively prepared to be delicious. Try this:
Take 1 head of broccoli, peel the stem & cut it into large pieces. Put it in a microwave-safe bowl with about an inch of water at the bottom. Put a plate over top of it and put it in the microwave for 2 or 2 1/2 minutes. Remove, pour off the water, sprinkle with a combination of any of the following:
* fresh ground pepper
* salt
* lemon juice
* extra virgin olive oil
* Parmesan cheese
Toss in some whole wheat pasta and some fresh crushed garlic, and you have a meal.
I guess y'all are lucky I haven't started ranting about food on TNG yet. ;-)
hmmm . . . there might have been a little more to michael's comment than he let on, but let's move on . . .
i think the vegetables suck at this place because nobody buys them and they sit. i'm as anti-chain as the next knee-jerk liberal but i will only buy my produce. (i would also but it at the dupont farmer's market but i am either sleeping, watching football, or hungover on sunday mornings before noon) everything there looks better and is more likely to be organic and edible.
michael - i have a food rant for you. let's talk.
and oh: i would add chick peas to michael's recipe. for the protein. a gay vegetarian man cannot live on muscle milk alone.
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