Shopping lists
Little food stories, each and every one.
(Iliffe Media originally published an earlier and shorter version of this piece.)
(Michelangelo Buonarroti 1518. Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy)
As you might imagine, the engineer, architect, sculptor, painter, and poet Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was quite a busy man, but even the busiest people need to eat. And if one needs to eat, then one must also shop in whatever fashion suits one best. I am busy, but I am not grand, so I do my own shopping, but Michelangelo had servants. He would send them to market with an illustrated shopping list – not because he liked drawing so much he couldn’t stop – but because the servant he was sending to market was illiterate. And how do we know this? A few of these lists survive as part of the collection of the Florence museum Casa Buonarroti. They are illustrated with tiny, precise ideograms of anchovies, bowls of fennel soup, ‘un bocal di vino’ (a small quarter of rough wine), ‘pani dua’ (two loaves of bread) and Tortelli. They are exquisite.
(Galileo Notebook with List for Experiment and Groceries. Museo Galileo, Florence
Galileo Galilei’s shopping list was written in black ink on the back of a letter in 1609, and that detail alone pleases me although, in this paperless year of our lord 2020, the art of letter writing seems to be a dying one. Written a few months before the introduction of the telescope he developed to spot Jupiter’s moons, Galileo’s list details the equipment he required, preceded by a string of more prosaic comestibles. Vincenzo needs “shoes and a hat”; the larder new supplies of lentils, spices, and white chickpeas; rice, raisins, and spelt. Towards the end of his list, ivory combs and a reminder to “pay debts to Lord Mannucci and give him back the Edilio” are noted. This suggests to me that Galileo was a man who not only enjoyed his food (he was Italian after all) but also knew that a well-ordered household frees one up to do other, more cerebral, things.
Leonardo Da Vinci left behind scores of notebooks crammed with his thoughts on food and drink and its quality and value. He notes that a pound of veal, a bottle of wine, and a basket of eggs cost “one soldo” each. Interspersed with these musings are diagrams for complicated kitchen gadgets, including a machine to cube pork and a whisk that was twice the size of a man, making the job of a turnspit seem relatively safe. Of more interest to me are his shopping lists which he sadly did not leave fluttering on the floor of the market or discarded in a store trolley (why did he not invent one?) for people like me to find. I often wonder what this man, who believed all tasks could be mechanized, would make of shopping today? His notebooks reflect his life as it was and how it could be as imagined by the good man himself. They allow us to bring Galileo into the present day too. When I read about his lists, I imagine him striding around a farmers market, Waitrose or Morrisons, notebook in hand, busily sketching out improvements to flow, layout, and design. However, I suspect that, like Hockney and unlike me, he’d embrace digital design systems and use a tablet rather than a notebook.
There is a story in everything, so I look for shopping lists and till receipts. The pickings are rich: clipped to supermarket trolleys or left behind on conveyor belts; blowing about in the local marketplace; inside second-hand cookbooks; and online too, where several sites exist solely to document them. They are everywhere if you pay attention, and I know I am not alone in my interest.
When I tweeted about my fascination with shopping lists a while back, Nigella Lawson herself admitted to the very same and, since then, has gone on to write about her love of a list. A shopping list is the haiku of the food world, where the story of people, their lives, and their priorities lay waiting to be discovered, far beyond what initially appears to be a rather utilitarian piece of writing. All kinds of lists are fascinating, although some have a longer life expectancy than others (the US constitution is a list, after all). Others are more ephemeral and exist as snapshots of a brief moment in domestic time like a missive written on papyrus by Heraclides to his brother Petechois. He asks him to buy bread, poultry, lupines, chickpeas, kidney beans & fenugreek. Written in Greek, its origins lie in early 3rd Century AD Egypt, and it tells of the high literacy rates that existed at the time.
(Papyrus Shopping List in Greek by Heraclides 3rd century A.D. Metropolitan Museum, New York)
Shopping lists can tell of seasonal fresh starts: the Back To School list of a particularly jolly-sounding child with “neon pencils”, “grey school skirt, not pleated”, ‘Hello Kitty lunchbox, and apple tissues” is a particular favourite of mine. Some are very prescriptive and revealing of brand loyalties; “RADOX bath soak” (The Radox heavily underlined with this proviso: “Sainsbury’s own brand VERY similar, DON’T muddle up!” whilst others inadvertently reveal household hierarchies. A recent shopping list find saw dog food (dried) at the top of the list, followed by dog treats (Dentastix, a particular brand and not inexpensive either) whilst the human food is non-specific – ‘fruit’, ‘cheese’, ‘cereal’, ‘decaf teabags’ – and falls further down the list. The dog’s needs are foremost in the mind of the list compiler. Their dog eats meat, but someone else in that household eats Quorn. Do they experience a moral dilemma every time they buy meat for a dog? Are they vegetarian or trying Meat-free Monday for size? (I found the list on a Monday.)
In these days of Covid, the physical shopping list is becoming a rarity. When we read a recipe online, we can add its ingredients straight to a digital shopping list stored on a gadget the size of our hand. We can share these lists with other family members. Hell, even our fridge can note when our milk is running low and send a reminder to our phone. But whilst efficient, they strip out the personal context that I crave. I like trolleys with little clipboards for attaching my anarchic handwritten list, which begins its life as organised and categorical (fruit and veg; meat; fish) but descends into chaos as I add everything I have forgotten at first draft. Yet, I still do not want to walk around a store or market with a digitally clear but dead-at-heart phone list in my hand. My phone lacks the sense of place and space of my handwritten lists written on scraps of paper torn from my current kitchen notebook, or the back of a brown envelope, or on the back of a store receipt fished from the bottom of a tote bag where they accumulate until I get around to marking them up and filing them so the taxman doesn’t come after me. The lists I write on lined paper tend to be more defiantly chaotic than those on unlined— which makes no sense at all.
Yet our brains do work spatially; we locate what we recall by place, and a shopping list serves as a store made real before we even set foot in it (the method of loci). The act of writing a list makes it more likely we will remember to buy what is on it too — even if we forget to take it with us. Supermarkets will try to push us into shopping emotionally instead of rationally; they want to tempt you away from your list because we tend to write them in the order by we move around a particular store or market. This does not encourage impulse buying. I remain unconvinced that digital lists have the same effect (well, on me, anyway).
To read someone else’s shopping list feels like a furtive act, albeit a deeply satisfying one, which requires the skills of a story weaver, detective, historian, and sociologist. Nosiness is, of course, a fundamental requirement. If you have not already fallen down this rabbit hole, I urge you to look online at some of the sites that collate discarded shopping lists and till receipts. From the Larkin-like Tesco’s receipt for “own-brand vodka and a Daily Mail” to lists where children have added their requests for “CRIPS” in bold, clumsy letters (assuming ‘crips’ to be the potato chip variety and not a supermarket range of LA-based gang members), and foods with people’s names next to them (“NOT FOR ME, FOR AUDREY” reads one), they are an endless source of entertainment and imaginings.
Further reading and references:
On Da Vinci’s eating and notebooks.
An online collection of shopping lists and a book of them.
And another collection.
Amanda Hesser interviews Bill Keaggy about his collection of lists [NYT]
Two pieces about Tom Lakeman who turns shopping list ingredients. Here and here.
What do discarded jottings say about our lives? Charlie Gilmour on the collection of artist Daisy Bentley.
Two pieces about artist Kenny Pittock and his piece "Fifty-two found shopping lists written by people who need milk’ here [Grazia] and here [Vogue Australia]
And Nigella on the joy of making lists. [The Times £]
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Loving the https://theshoppinglists.com/ link :)