Amazing: My Choice of Food in a Medium-Sized American City
Sitting eating really-worth-eating strawberries and cream in my newly-screened in back patio, idly watching two cardinals facing off on the grass, I reflected on how amazed I am by the food choices in the city where I now live, Lexington, Kentucky. Lexington is home to about 350,000 people, and another 150,000 live in the metropolitan area. A couple of hundred years ago this would have made it one of the bigger cities in the world, now it just counts as medium sized.
Not medium in its choice of food though. None of those world class cities two hundred years ago would have had such a choice. I’m not talking about restaurants, because restaurants are out for me. I’m just talking about retail.
Draw a semicircle centered on my house, located in a middle class suburb about six miles south of the city center, and here’s the available food retail.
Kroger supermarkets, half a dozen or more. Headquartered in Cincinnati, an hour’s drive north of here. Well run, wide choice in one of the biggest chains in the US, my go to for my weekly on line, pick up grocery shop.
Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Fresh Market. Strong on upmarket prepared food (though I prefer my own cooking). Trader Joe’s has endives and green tea mochi ice cream, Whole Foods has more smoked fish than anywhere else, and Fresh Market is small, accessible and has nice cheese.
Edit. Another omission. Good Foods Coop with a popular hot food bar and all the things you expect from the late 60s and 70s.
Mexican supermarkets, bakeries, tortillerias, and ice cream stores. Many. First rate corn tortillas made from scratch, not masa. Supermarkets for one of my favorite vegetables, huazontle, as well as chicken feet and real chicharron (friend pork rind with the skin on). The bakeries are disappointing. The ice cream stores are not.
Two Japanese, one Korean, one Indian grocery (bitter melon and other Indian vegetables, frozen dosa mix, good yogurt, plus spices and a growing range of prepared and processed foods). Chinese cum pan-East Asian grocery with strong Filipino section. Good on Chinese vegetables, meat and fish, and packaged goods.
Caribbean/ West African grocery and three, maybe more, Middle Eastern groceries plus (joy) a hand made Middle Eastern pastry store. Russian/East Asian grocery with good cold meats, pickles, jams, and bread.
Dollar Stores. Stores that sell everything for a dollar from party and craft supplies to groceries. Half a dozen. Don’t laugh. Not where you’d go for fresh vegetables (there are none) but good for canned and packaged foods in small sizes for singles or small families with small appetites like us. Plus surprising bargains on good stuff.
Edit. How could I forget Walmart? Love their thin cut meats for the ‘milanesas’ (breaded cutlets) I miss from Mexico, and other kinds of Mexican cuts of meat at least where there are Mexican communities. Not so keen on their baked goods but their basic groceries are good.
Edit. And yet another omission, Aldi’s. I don’t find as much in this American instantiation of the chain as I did in the ones in Spain and England. Friends elsewhere talk of lots of German specialties but they don’t seem to have made it to Lexington.
And while we’re on the subject of places thought to be down market, the convenience stores attached to gas stations. Given the low profit margins on gas, quite a number of these offer take out besides snack foods. The take out does tend to run to pizza and fried chicken but some have surprisingly good home cooking to go.
A first-rate European bread bakery. Various bakeries devoted to cakes that I have not really explored.
Excellent butcher who will cut to order. Also first rate country ham and bacon, bison, goat, various birds, pig’s feet, calves’ liver and all kinds of other offal, as well as take out, groceries, pies, local butter and honey, and beaten biscuits.
Farmers’ markets. Today those strawberries, pea shoots, baby turnips, tomatoes, and flowers.
No deep analysis today. Just as I said, amazing. Worth reflecting on.
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FARmers”markets are keyy, esp this time of year.
They are good here in Lexington, Peter, something I am very grateful for. They are so much better than in Austin, Texas where the summer heat quickly reduced the offerings to watermelon and okra. So I am really glad that the supply chains are delivering to both the big chains and the specialist retailers of particular regional foods.
A European bakery! That is golden.
Golden indeed. These are the breads they offer daily. https://bluegrassbakingcompany.com/daily-breads/ Please drool. And they offer others on a weekly basis plus cookies, cakes, pies, and savory baked goods.
Hi, Rachel!It’s very interesting that although it is much smaller than Austin, it seems to offer more ethnic restaurants and food sources.
Curiously, yes. You can find all this in Austin and many of the Asian stores are huge supermarkets but you have to travel a lot further.
I agree, even though I was last in Lexington, KY, back in ca. 1982. But midcoast Maine has similar sorts of wide and varied food choices, several excellent weekly farmers markets, really-really good bread, a first-rate butcher who actually cuts the meat himself, some good local cheese-makers (and some REALLY good cheese-makers in nearby Vermont), breweries, fisher folk providing right now fresh Atlantic halibut as well as the usual lobsters and locally raised oysters–I could go on and on. Curiously, the local supermarket (a branch of Hannaford’s, otherwise very good) seems to exist in a 1950’s daydream but I’m sure the wake-up call is around the corner. All of this is so enormously far removed from this region when I was a kid growing up here. Yes, we had good locally farmed food and locally fished sea stuff, but the rest of it was in cans and tins and boxes from far away and seasonal was an almost unknown adjective. Huge changes have taken place in my lifetime and while there are still far too many people who cannot afford the bounty at least it is there, along with the knowledge that implies.
Thanks, Nancy. Really interesting that you have the same experience. Agreed that this is not accessible to all though I suspect what is has increased too.
I’m here in a small city in Northern Minnesota (Hibbing pop 16000) so I don’t have nearly the choices you have but I agree with most of your observations.
I live downtown so my nearest food source is a Station/Convenience store nicknamed “Ghetto” Holiday. It has more walk-in than drive-in trade and I kind of like the ambience!
It does have maybd the best coffee in town from a complicated self-service machine that’s dirt cheap. If I was a local cafe or national coffee chain I’d be worried😮
I need that machine! But agreed that convenience stores are not necessarily what they used to be.
The average working man now eats more variety than most kings did 300 years ago! What we call variety they called luxuries and fought wars over them, gave their sons and daughters in martiage alliances to gain access to them, colonized and subjugated peoples for them. Even in my mother’s time in Italy, everything they ate came from about 25 ingredients, and they may have had access to another 25 luxury goods very occasionally.
Exactly.
Yes, but. . . I would still take the quality and variety of locally produced food in my small town in southern Tuscany over the offerings in my equally small town in Maine. The artichokes alone, in size, variety and cost are, as they say, worth a trip to Italy just to experience.
Too bad Maine doesn’t have a Tuscan climate!
What a great blog piece!! I’ve been thinking about food availability recently since I started researching and writing recipes and their history from my mother-in-law (1934-2014) and great grandmother (1876-1963). To think there was a time when celery was new on the food scene and tacos were exotic (east coast)! I fully appreciate regional food sources and I just love hearing about what you have available. When I lived in Orlando, then Clearwater Florida, years ago, I used my GPS to find markets when I was new in the area. You do a search for “market” and the choices all pop up from nearest to farthest.
Yes, I find it hard to believe that growing up in England in the 50s, the only rice available was short grain for pudding, the only pasta or noodles, macaroni.
Wow – that’s quite a selection, and a world away from what I’m offered in my very small country town which is just 1/2 hour away from the state capitol, a city of more than 1 million. However, I can access a similar selection if I’m prepared to drive into the city (minus the Mexican selection, because very view Mexicans here).
Clearly we are spoilt for choice in the US. I am not sure it necessarily results in better eating!
Yes, and Gluten-Free Miracles for fresh baked GF bread/pastries! I’m also in Lexington but grew up with 0 options within 10 miles.