It's lovely to wake up in your own sun-drenched room after a long night of sleep. Especially if you have the Rochester Public Market to look forward to. By American standards, it is a pretty long-standing tradition -- in continuous (if itinerant) operation since 1827. This is young relative to my alma mater, but even the latter seems juvenile now that I've walked through university dining halls at Cambridge that have served continuously as dining halls for 600 years. In Dorset, I settled down with Naomi's latest copy of Cambridge Alumni Magazine and read and reread the final sentence on the back page: "And now for a literary return to 1350's Cambridge." For the new dean of a college to operate atop a stack of so many centuries of history, and to simply take it in stride and enjoy a fictionalized version of it at the end of a long day... does she not find joining such a vast academic family tree intimidating? At least in a post-Modern sense?
I digress. The post office is now issuing Louis Comfort Tiffany stamps, which I happily stocked up on in nominal vanity. The Rite-Aid pharmacy was next, but closed again -- in fact, shut on Saturdays until further notice. Lame factor doubled. After popping in cheerfully at the Little Bakery, I trekked out to the Public Market and emerged with a large backpack and two tote bags worth of fresh produce. But this wasn't my usual style of shopping. I arrived with no shopping list, only a mind determined to scope out what was in season and to buy it. It was a liberating experience, made possible by my experience of cooking with garden-picked produce in Belgium. And a better choice for the environment.
I can't say that the Eggplant Catalana recipe I dug up and tried to make with my fresh loot was quite a success, but that's because I'm still incapable of cooking the eggplant itself. The recipe should be worth a second shot.
John and I ran joint shopping errands and spent some time at the sample iPhone at the Marketplace Mall. EMS had some good discounts on clothing I may revisit if I somehow scrounge up the cash. As usual, the Wegman's there disoriented me a bit, but what disoriented me most was John's brief history of grocery shopping in Rochester. Neither of us buy into the Wegman's fan club or appreciate that its only city branch is on University. But Wegman's used to have stores in the center of town. Yes, in the center of town! But take a look at your average joe on the downtown sidewalk. He is the not person Wegman's is interested in serving. So although these stores weren't unprofitable, they were closed in favor of more educated, higher income populations in the suburbs--leaving us with nary a neighborhood grocery, as those couldn't compete when Wegman's was in town and don't have the capital to start up now. Trader Joe's was recently courted for the empty space across from RoCo by the parking lot, but wasn't interested in areas in which less than about 40% of customers have college degrees. Central Rochester's figure? Half that.
All this informal history aside, no grocery store seems to think that opening in central Rochester would be profitable. There are plenty of models of successful city groceries. There's a Whole Foods on one of the hillsides by downtown SF. Exiting at Putney Bridge in London, I noticed that a good 75% of the business people were going home from central London with one or two Sainsbury's bags although they lived on the outskirts of town. Antwerp has a GB outside the station beneath the cinema complex and Wagamama, a stone's throw from the city's most exclusive fashion shopping, as well as an organic grocery off the Meir. People drive out to the middle of nowhere Rochester to buy groceries. What makes supermarkets think that they wouldn't drive into Rochester or stop in after a day's work in downtown? They've been buying produce at the Public Market for 180 years, and nowadays it's in a rather worse spot than the area Trader Joe's examined beneath premium condominiums.
Speaking of which, the tremendous traffic jams at the Public Market are entirely counterintuitive. The sale of local produce is just not the sort of operation that inspires visions of urban sprawl's worst problems. But there you go--no decent public transportation and nary a bicycle rack. The amount of fuel and energy you save by buying locally grown produce is pretty much offset or overwhelmed by the exhaust you release waiting in traffic and cruising around in search of a parking space.
Reverse culture shock. It's back.
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