A few months ago, I gave up on my local grocery store. It pained me to do so, because I would prefer to shop at the closest market to my apartment, but after two years of enduring barely disguised human-rights abuses at the hands of the D’Agostino chain, which culminated early this spring when I picked up a Holland tomato and it dissolved in my hand – and despite what you might think, dear reader, the verb “dissolve” does not overstate the case even a little bit – I started going to a nicer market. I had gotten used to the exorbitant pricing and the narrow aisles and the checkout lines that snaked up into the dairy aisle, around the corner into the meat section, and on out to the Hamptons. I could deal with the anti-feng shui arrangement by which certain types of cheeses and certain brands of diaper cream lived on the same shelf. I didn’t so much mind the little man who walked up to me as I filled my basket, cleared his throat, and said, “Minestrone. I won’t say anymore,” or the confused older lady (attired, inexplicably, in a formal gown and pink Isotoner gripper slippers) who told me, “Get away from me, you bitch,” when I reached past her for a box of Frosted Flakes. But when I walked in one afternoon and found a camera crew from the BBC clustered around the cauliflower as David Attenborough gravely narrated the doings of a bustling insect colony, I suddenly didn’t mind the thought of walking an extra eight blocks nearly as much as once had, and when the tomato liquefied all over my fingers, I vowed that, provided I could ever bring myself to eat again, I would take my lazy ass to a different grocery.

Nowadays, I go to Garden Of Eden (or to the Gristede’s that just opened). Garden Of Eden has yummy fresh bread from the bakery next door, and produce so fresh it hurts, and all sorts of pretentious products aimed squarely at foodies who subscribe to Gourmet Magazine – dandelion paste, for example, and goose bacon, and hundred-year-old balsamic vinegar made by Dominican friars with saints’ relics floating in the bottle, and an olive bar. Unfortunately, not only does it take much longer to get to Garden Of Eden and back than to D’Agostino, but it also takes much longer to get in and out of Garden Of Eden. For reasons I still haven’t figured out, Garden Of Eden attracts a clientele composed almost entirely of people whose mothers dropped them on their heads not once but numerous times during their infancies. If you’ve ever seen the movie Clerks, when the girl asks the video-store guy if they have any new releases in while standing directly beneath a giant sign reading “NEW RELEASES,” you get the general idea.

The madness begins at the bread counter, when a woman inquires testily of the bread-counter staffer how exactly they expect her to make sandwiches from a whole loaf of bread. When the staffer points out that the woman could cut up the loaf, the woman snorts, “With what?” The staffer suggests a knife. The woman rolls her eyes. Then the staffer offers to slice it up for her, at which point the woman’s husband materializes from behind a tower of mangoes and yelps, “No! No slicing! The flavor will leak out!” He snatches the loaf from the staffer’s hand and stalks away. I open my mouth to order a loaf for myself, but as I do so, a woman old enough to remember the signing of the Constitution toddles in front of me and says she just has “a quick question.” Ten minutes later, the “These Cookies: Kosher Or Not?” debate still raging on, I give up and head into the produce area.

If you have ever wondered how to go about identifying an insufficiently socialized adult, look no further than the produce area at Garden Of Eden. Weird, annoying, and invasive behavior inscrutable to even the most seasoned anthropologist represents the norm, so if you want to observe the natives unnoticed, try one of the following activities in order to fit in: picking up, fondling lasciviously, and returning to the pile every single avocado in the pyramid; rolling red onions on the floor to gauge their freshness (“nope, no good – see how it sliced there at the end?”); thwocking a cantaloupe with your middle finger, injuring said finger by thwocking too enthusiastically, and slamming the guilty melon back down in a fit of pique; eating loose green beans and then complaining that they “taste sort of dirty”; violently shaking bunches of kale in a super-scary Charo-meets-the-Frugal-Gourmet fashion; telling your girlfriend to “go long” at the other end of the (relatively short) aisle, firing a buttonhook pass at her head with an eggplant, and roaring, “ANGela, Jesus CHRIST!” when she ducks out of the way instead of catching it; so on and so forth. Also available in the produce section: proof positive that there is too such a thing as a stupid question. Questions overheard on an average weekend afternoon defy belief, inquiries such as “now, by ëseedless,’ do you mean no seeds, or just a few seeds, or what?” and “about these bananas – do you have any that are less yellow?” How the employees refrain from throttling these people, I have no idea. How I
myself refrain from throttling these people, I have no idea either.

In the other sections of the store – the pasta aisle, for example, or the deli counter – customers switch gears from “stupid” to “shameless.” Other shoppers twist open jars, sniff the contents, close the jars, and put them back. Other shoppers pinch the Camembert and leave finger-sized dents in it. Other shoppers hold up dozens of other people by asking the deli guy to cut them one slice each of eight different types of lunch meat. But the olive bar brings out the worst in everyone. See, Garden Of Eden supplies toothpicks so that customers can sample an olive or two before filling up a little plastic carton with them. ONE olive. Or TWO. NOT five or six of EVERY KIND of olive and three or four of the MUSHROOMS for good measure. I once saw a woman in a floor-length mink snack around the entire circumference of the olive bar, then leave the store without buying anything. The last time I went, a guy with a Prada backpack used a toothpick he had just put IN HIS MOUTH to poke around in the pickled mushroom jar for a nice fat one. I mean, these people apparently have a little extra money to spend – why don’t they buy what they want and eat it AT HOME? And don’t get me started on the people who pretend never to have tried cheddar before so that they can get a “taster” from the guy running the cheese wheel. I mean, I’ll cop to batting the occasional lash in exchange for a free piece of liverwurst, but give me a break with the whole “mmm, ‘cheddar’ – I’ll have to remember that” routine.

I still like the place, though, despite the freakish clientele. Garden Of Eden stocks the freshest of everything, and if you need a clove- treated pork knuckle, you can find it there. I have to wonder about men who refuse to avail themselves of either a basket or a plastic bag, staggering instead through the narrow walkways with twenty-five potatoes clutched to their chests, but every grocery in New York has its own peculiar breed of static. At one produce market on Second Avenue, I dislodged a watermelon from the pile, and by doing so revealed a small grey cat sleeping on the little ledge beneath the fruit. The cat blinked at me, and I said, “Aw. Hello, cat,” and put the watermelon back. Down the street from D’Agostino at Food Emporium, shoppers must employ their knowledge of chaos theory in order to find anything. In the smaller delis, a dented box of Pop Tarts can run you as much as five bucks, and they feel no compunction about charging a dollar each for wizened pieces of fruit. (And my mother wonders why I order in all the time?) But Garden Of Eden has something special. At no other market in New York can you hear Angela retort, “Oh, excuse ME, Mr. Elway.” In front of no other spice shelf can you watch a man explain, with a straight face, that “the difference
between white peppercorns and green ones is that one is white and one is green.” Why just stock your fridge when you can get a front-row seat to rich people acting stingy, or join in the game of red-onion bocci, or catch a cold from a garlic olive? Why not bone up on those acting skills by saying things like, “Now, this ‘Brie’ I keep hearing about – is that a German cheese?”

On second thought, why not stay home, watch Clerks again, and send out for wings? It’s a lot safer.

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