The Dolce Vita Diaries

It’s funny how things come around. Until relatively recently, the idea of the Italian daily shopping trip - to buy the fresh produce for that day’s lunch and supper – was anathema to many Brits. We preferred the idea of a lengthy shopping list and a still lengthier trip to a supermarket to stock up on everything we might desire for the week to come. We’d feel smug and organised as we filed our purchases into cupboards and fridges and congratulate ourselves on our time-saving planning. But how often did we do this only to look in the fridge, even hours later, to find there was still ’nothing to eat’ or ‘nothing I quite feel like’? Or worse still, how often did we commit the crime of having to throw away unused, gone-off items which never managed to find their desired moment? If you’re anything like me, quite often. Depressingly often. To the extent that it became clearer and clearer that the supermarket weekly shop was not all it was cracked up to be.

The daily shop, and even more so, the market shop, is the answer. It works on a much more human scale in every way. You can carry everything without breaking your arms. You know what you feel like because you are dealing with the present tense not some speculative future. You can fit it in as a little break between other jobs. You can see what is fresh and there.  You know how much you need because you know how many you’re catering for and how hungry you are. And you can spy on other people’s purchases to get ideas.

In a tiny village like Loro Piceno the spying element is not to be underestimated. Everyone shops in the same place (there’s only one food shop in the centre), so everyone can see exactly what everyone else is buying. There is undoubtedly a sense of cooking competitiveness. If there’s a particularly choice cut at the meat counter, there will be a rabble elbowing each other out of the way to get it. There’ll be a run on artichokes if an influential local figure declares them to be fine. There will be disdain for anyone with too much prepackaged food in their basket. Market day on a Monday would make a fascinating study in group psychology, as people queue for ages to get zucchini from stall A, even though there is no queue at all for the seemingly identical offerings at stall B.

And now the Brits are slowly coming around to the ‘small and often’ philosophy of shopping. It’s not that they’re turning from the supermarkets – far from it – but they are using them with a bit more sense of the market (with its associations of fresh produce, recently plucked from a supplier and soon to be sent towards stomach) and a bit less sense of super (the idea that everything has to be scaled up). And hooray for that.