A tale of two grocery stores

I was at the Clarion WalMart on Saturday getting some vegetables for Randy to cook authentic-ish Chinese food for the family on Sunday. At the checkout, the cashier quickly ran my groceries past the scanner and bagged them, until she got to one particular item that gave her surprising difficulty. She picked up my bunch of fresh green beans and set them on the scale. She entered a code on the register that was immediately rejected with a long beep. She picked up the bag, studied the beans, and put them back on the scale. Then consulting a list she attempted another 4-digit code. That was also rejected/ Beeeep! She returned to her list, now asking me if I knew what kind of peas these were. Green beans, I told her, trying not to sound anything but helpful. She still could not find them on her index of produce, so she asked the cashier next to her for the code for green beans. The other woman was able to find the necessary code. My cashier apologized, saying that the most common fruits and vegetables she had memorized, but she had never come across green beans.

Odd to me, and a bit sad this little scene.  Not only, perhaps, in her real life, but also in her work this cashier never came into contact with a fresh green bean. She had even thought mine were peas. So many WalMart customers rely on canned or frozen, likely, so that she normally only had to scan the bar codes. And this comes in the middle of a what is still a farming area!  But I think this is what people are talking about when they are talking about Americans being too far removed from their food source.


Three weeks ago I was in Giant Eagle in Pittsburgh.  I was in the cheese department, looking for Manchego, a cheese imported from Spain.  I was soon to be leaving Pittsburgh to go to my inlaws' in the Clarion area, and I knew that if I wanted this cheese I would have to hit a grocery in Pittsburgh, but, thankfully, not a specialty store, as I may have to in year's past.  I just needed to stop at Giant Eagle, a normal grocery store.  As I was looking through the Spanish section of cheeses, an African American store employee who had just finished restocking another shelf of cheeses asked if she could help me.  I told her I had just found it, my favorite, the Manchego cheese, to which she said to me, "Isn't that just the best? It might be my favorite, too."

Without the globalization of food, how much opportunity would an African American grocery store worker have to eat imported Spanish cheese?  Heck, how much would I?  A few years ago I would have to go to a Tapas restaurant (which are never cheap) or seek out some specialty cheese import store (which are also never cheap) to eat Manchego. I am sure what I buy in Giant Eagle is of lesser quality than what I could buy in Spain, but I can still buy some type of Manchego, right here, in the US.

Fresh, in-season, local or one world, one food.  Are these that incompatible? Should I be reading Pollan?