Grocery Shopping, Swiss Style

**Sorry . . . it's way too cold to go out and take pictures for this blog. You'll have to use your imagination.**

     If you are a wife or mother, it is likely that two responsibilities follow you wherever you go in the world: They are the responsibility for the house and the responsibility for the food. You may delegate one or both of these responsibilities to kids, helpful husbands, or paid employees, but, if you are like me, you still feel a sense of ownership in these areas.
      In my experience, housecleaning in Geneva is not that much different from in the U.S. I find that I'm doing more myself, since I am at home during the day while the rest of the family is at school or work and since we try to keep Saturdays free for outings. When the kids have a day off school, they can bet I'll earn meanest Mom of the year awards by assigning them cleaning jobs (actually, I think they are so used to this practice that they don't even think it's mean). Many of my friends here employ cleaning help. As soon as I can figure out how to justify this -- given that I have no children at home, no paid employment, and probably do a better job cleaning than anyone we could hire -- I will be right there with them. Until then, however, I'll be cleaning bathrooms weekly and sweeping the floor ABOUT EVERY FIVE MINUTES (our floors are white and we have lots of trees, i.e. dead leaves, around the house).
     So housework here is really not all that interesting. The food situation, however, presents more of a contrast to the U.S., and more of a challenge for me. The first difference I noticed is that one must be more prepared for a grocery shopping trip here than back in the States. If you do not have your coin (it could be 1 or 2 euros or 1 or 2 francs, depending on the store), you do not get a cart. And if you do not have your own grocery bags, you have the choice of paying 30 centimes each to buy them at the store or carrying all of your groceries home in your hands. I am thankful to my friend Nancy, who lived here several years ago, for preparing me for these preliminary shopping hurdles. This was especially helpful because I was severely jet-lagged on my first trip to the grocery, and being denied a cart might have sent me into hysterics.
     The second grocery challenge is the prices. The first several times I went shopping, I emerged from the store feeling simultaneously depressed and panicked. A Swiss franc (chf) is slightly more than a dollar, so milk priced at 1.60 chf a liter caused some serious palpitations, as did ice cream at 8 chf a liter and cereal at around 5 chf for a smallish box. Red meat, which costs about 30 chf a kilogram, (and isn't even very good), seemed as unattainable as the stars. My sticker shock was compounded both by the fact that, having just moved here, we had no stock of food, and by the fact that Drew and Lucas were trying to do the P90X diet and wanted all kinds of specialty items.
      One solution to the price problem is to shop in France, where food is less expensive. I go to Bible study on Thursday mornings in a town called Ferney-Voltaire, and there is a large Carrefour Supermarche near the church. So, it made sense for me to start shopping there on Thursdays. Buying groceries at Carrefour, however, also had its drawbacks. First of all, I hated the place, which reminded me of Wal-Mart on steroids. Not only did I hate the bright lights, packed aisles, and dubious quality of many goods, but I especially hated the fact that I had to bag my own groceries (which is true everywhere in both Switzerland and France. With my huge cartfull of goods, I couldn't fit everything on the belt at once, and the checkers wouldn't let me through to start bagging until the cart was empty, and then I felt like I was holding up the entire line (which not just a feeling, but the reality) while I inexpertly and frenetically tried to shove everything into sacks. I always tried to go to a line where someone in front of me had an even bigger cartload, so at least I would not be alone. The other issue with shopping in France is that there are import regulations on meat, milk, fruit, wine, and all kinds of other things. For example, one can only bring half a kilo (about a pound) of beef into Switzerland from France. That, unfortunately, is not enough to feed our family for a week. Sometimes I went over the limit, figuring that if the broder guards stopped me, I'd just pay the fine, whatever it may be. But I always had a sick feeling in my stomach driving through the douane, whether or not I had contraband orange juice in the back of the car. I am, therefore, thankful for the current weakness of the franc against the euro (kept that way by the Swiss on purpose for people like me), because it means that shopping in France is no longer that much cheaper than shopping in Switzerland.
     Besides a shlep to France, other good shopping options include Aldi-Suisse, which is just like Aldi in the U.S., except that the meat all has little Swiss flags and pictures of the animal it comes from. This is very helpful, seeing that groceries here sell horse meat. I just avoid any packages with little pictures of horses. Even Swiss horses. There is also a store nearby called Aligro, which is sort of like Costco in that it sells large quantities of items (it is, unfortuantely, not like Costco in that the items are cheaper). For the Swiss, "large quantites" means several 1-kilo packages of flour wrapped together with shrink wrap. Then they have to put a sign on everything telling shoppers not to separate items. This is because, in a regular grocery store, people feel free to, for example, take one yogurt carton out of a package or one can of Coke out of the box and buy it that way.
     Another interesting differences between groceries here and in the U.S. is that here, the eggs are not kept refrigerated. This worries me, but I haven't seen anyone dead of salmonella poisoning yet, so I guess it must be okay. Most milk is not refrigerated either, because it is that UHT pasteurized stuff that lasts forever. We buy the refrigerated kind which is, of course, more expensive (but tastes much more "normal" to us). In most stores, you have to weigh your own produce. I have yet to find whole oats in a store here, though they do have surprising items such as taco seasoning packets and Nesquik. The boxed cereal is not as sweet, the sodas are sweetened with sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup, and almost every store bakes its own bread. On the down side, the carts are impossible to push in a straight line. I have not yet figured out why this might be.  The fact that I am now shopping Swiss (mostly) will warm the hearts of my neighbors. One of my friends told me that many locals use grocery bags from Swiss stores when shopping in France to avoid nasty comments about not supporting their country.
     My latest wonderful discovery is online grocery shopping. Both of the big local chains, Coop and Migros, have sites. It does take about an hour to order everything online, but I can do it with a cup of coffee at my right hand and the cupboards and refrigerator nearby in case I forget what I have. The groceries come the next evening, and the frequency of coupons paying for delivery has soothed my guilt about taking the easy way out. You'll see, now that I've calmed my conscience about grocery delivery, soon I'll be justifying the hiring of a maid to do my housework.