The Berkeley Bowl

For most of the people I know, we are the only ones they know of who live in Berkeley, CA. So in my next few blogs I would like to highlight some of the activities that used to be very significant to Grant and myself but are now becomoing an everyday way of life. The first of which is the Berkeley Bowl grocery store.

The Berkeley Bowl parking lot is always full. I drive past it on my way to school everyday and at 7am the parking lot is full of trucks bringing in tons of fresh produce for the store. California has quite a good amount of unique and delicious produce from its thriving (and water sucking) agricultural industry. Once the store opens at 9am, the crowds flock and keep the place busy through out the whole day until 8 at night. The best time that we've found to go is around 7pm on a Friday.

At first, one might be very overwhelmed with the Berkeley Bowl experience. "Why are there so many people in here?" "Why are the lines so long" "What's up with that guy's hair?" "Lets just skip the ethnic food isle because its jammed with carts," "You mean there was a separate scale for bulk food items that we had to go to?" "How do the cashiers memorize so many skew numbers?" "Will grocery shopping always take this long?" But then you learn to enjoy the fact that grocery shopping can be a leisure activity. You get to watch a great variety of people, speaking all kinds of languages, interacting as we do this dance, moving gingerly around each other, in the produce isles.

Berkeley Bowl is like many typical stores. It has the produce and freezer sections. It has a deli, with a place to eat, the meat and cheese counters. It has a bulk food section and dairy area. But it is not the sections that make the difference, no the essence of BB is in the food that is there. We always buy the cage free eggs with the drawings of the chickens throwing their cages on the carton. We strole down the bulk food isle and decide what cereal we would like to have for the next week. "Here is the bulk couscous, would you like whole wheat this time?" "How are we doing on noodles? Do you want to try the veggie spirials?"

At first we thought that the Berkeley Bowl was grossly over priced. We thought that going there would be an experience that we would only take in once in a grear while. Then we shopped around. Whole Foods = still expensive. Albertson's = still expensice. Andronico's = still expensice. Safeway = bad produce, cheaper prices on boxed things, but after living in Berkeley not quite acceptable. So we are left with enjoying BB and Trader Joe's (a topic for another Blog and a store not really in Berkeley)

Grant has a gardening project that he's working on for his Ecofeminist Theology class and we needed to get pallets. I suggested that we go to a grocery store or drug store and check in back. So we went to a nearby Safeway. We went inside to ask if we could take one. No one was at the customer service desk. No employee who walked by seemed to care that we were waiting. We looked around and thought of a few items we needed and said, "lets shop and come back." We wondered through the produce isle. It felt strange. The food arrangements looked weird. The food was different. Where were all the people? Where was the chatter of people talking on their phones with their handless headsets? Where was the organic section? Where are the 10 varieties of hot pepper? And then it dawned on me. I have truley become a real Berkeley citizen because I couldn't stand being able to walk down clear isles in a store other than the Berkeley Bowl.

You must come visit.