The garden of eatin': In a global supermarket, international lines are blurred
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FAIRFIELD, Ohio — The jar of Jamaican jerk sauce is tucked away in the shopping cart — right under the British oatmeal, the Indonesian sambal, the Greek grape leaves and the Spanish pickled olives. And just as Dale Wiemer comes around the corner of the aisle with the white millet, his wife checks her laser-printed list and scowls.
"I got the mango puree," Katie Wiemer says. "But we forgot to write down the soba noodles."
Across the floor, international-produce manager Chris Stoll is on the Internet, downloading e-mailed photos of green-grape orders from Chile. In meat, the butchers are setting out fresh duck feet and beef hooves — bargains at $1.10 and $1.79 a pound. Down in Hispanic foods, the turbaned gentleman is loading up on the Goya pinto beans. And along the 75-foot wall of beers, the Asian couple is discussing whether to buy the big bottle of Chimay Ale, brewed in Belgium by Trappist monks.
Tough decisions. But mornings can be like that in the Cincinnati suburb of Fairfield — if you're shopping at Jungle Jim's International Farmers Market.
Once, the food on American tables came from the corner grocer, the neighborhood butcher and baker — and, beyond that, from fields and slaughterhouses across the land. That was before the world stitched itself together into a big planetary smorgasbord.
Today, sprawling over four acres north of Cincinnati, Jungle Jim's is the endpoint of a staggering global network of farmers, suppliers, producers and distributors. Each day, the gates of its loading docks roll open to take in a whopping 110,000 different products, fresh and canned, boxed and frozen, shipped in from all over.
And the customers stream in from miles around, from two, three, four states away. They jam the aisles on weekends in Indian saris and Muslim veils and Yoruba caps, forming a frenzy of international bumper carts. Some drive all day to get here, carrying intricate lists of items. Ghee and rambutan and longan, kimchi and nopalitos and durian.
Some customers — America's meat-and-potatoes faithful — come seeking the offbeat, the tasty, the exotic. Others — the newer Americans and tomorrow's citizens — are looking for a bit of home.
The world gets smaller. Minds grow broader. Dinner is served.
Foreign food on American soil is hardly new; we're an immigrant nation, after all. Supermarkets have been expanding their international sections gradually for more than two decades as more Americans travel abroad — and beyond Europe — and return with culinary tales and adventurous palates. Younger Americans who dine out in ethnic restaurants want to try their hand at home. But technological progress during the past 10 years — everything from telecommunications to improved refrigeration and pest-killing techniques — has gone beyond merely creating the market for global foodstuffs; it has made that world possible. At the same time, multinational corporations are importing legions of skilled workers to jobs in the United States.
The worldly Wiemers
Such changes blur the line between local and global. Exhibit No. 1: the Wiemer family.
Twice a year, armed with their voluminous shopping list, they make the six-hour drive from Swansea, Ill. They tasted the world during their 10-country honeymoon, and have since added China, Greece, Mexico and Egypt. Topping their list: Japanese-style breadcrumbs ("They're crispier"); diced Mexican chipotles in adobo sauce; and green mangoes for a friend from Laos.
"In St. Louis, you might find an Asian store or an Indian store, but you can't go to one place," Katie Wiemer says.
Such smaller groceries typically cater to specific ethnicities and a small cadre of intrepid cooks; mainstream American shoppers, though, can be uneasy about venturing beyond supermarkets to such smaller emporiums.
"You never knew how long the item had been sitting there. There was some element of perceived risk," says Arun Jain, a University at Buffalo professor who studies supermarket retailing. "When these things are sold at standard supermarkets, it breeds confidence."
When Tom Hann, Jungle Jim's international-foods manager, came to the market two decades ago, international-foods sections were typically about 4 feet long and stocked with preposterously priced irrelevancies. "It was somebody's idea of gourmet," he recalls. "It wasn't food you were supposed to eat."
Today, Jungle Jim's stocks more than 20,000 items either imported from overseas or sold with an eye toward international tastes — everything from Song Hee broccoli (China) to bottles of Slavutych Beer (Ukraine). Products from Thailand, India, Japan and Chinese regions such as Szechuan are particularly popular. Even black-bear leg roast and duck prosciutto are available — at $21.99 a pound each.
Cumin? It's sold ground — and also whole, for Mexicans, who prefer it that way. Rice? Choose any of 22 kinds from around the world, some in 80-pound bags. Hot sauces? The number of varieties just topped 1,000. And miso — fermented Japanese soybean paste? Seventeen styles.
Then there's the ignominious durian, the Southeast Asian fruit that, the saying goes, "smells like hell but tastes like heaven." Jungle Jim's has it, sold frozen to neutralize the odor.
Presentation, too, suggests a diverse clientele. Fish is sold two ways — filleted, for Americans, and whole, with innards intact, for shoppers of other ethnic traditions who consider that fresher. And pork: While Americans like thick chops, Asian tastes run toward the thin. And while root vegetables like yuca, yam and taro are typically laid on the ground to be sold in many lands, not so Ohio; the health department says no. The compromise: a bottom shelf just above the floor.
Midwestern Cincinnati may seem an odd place for Jungle Jim's, but it's more diverse than it seems. Though it remains predominantly white, it is brimming with multinational operations, including Procter & Gamble, Mitsubishi, Bayer, Siemens and Toyota. The region exports $6.7 billion in sales annually.
What happens in many communities happens here: More foreign presence means more American contact with foreigners. And after that, the easiest way for "mainstream Americans" to explore foreign culture is often through food.
"I sometimes call it `ethnicity lite,' " says Marilyn Halter, author of "Shopping For Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity."
"Food becomes sort of a bridge between cultures — and a safe bridge," she says.
Jungle Jim
"You want a peanut?" says owner Jim Bonaminio, known simply as "Jungle." When a visitor declines, he breaks out his other stash — Gummi Bears stored in a crockery pot marked "Boogers."
The silver-haired Bonaminio, 51, launched Jungle Jim's in 1975 as an expansion of a roadside produce stand. Today, he oversees a domain four times the size of the average supermarket. It takes a quirky mind to oversee such a polyglot enterprise, and Bonaminio relishes the role. As "Jungle," he dons a pith helmet and loud shirt, then rides a scooter up and down aisles to greet customers.
"People say, `Thank you for having this store,' " he says. "I couldn't imagine a life of saying, `Yeah, man, I have 10 grocery stores and I sell Clorox cheap.' "
Phill Adams is a longtime Jungle Jim's employee whose duties include managing the sprawling deli and cheese operation. It does business with 125 vendors (most supermarket delis deal with five, maybe 10) and purveys 1,600 cheeses from 20 nations.
International foods is even more intricate: 300 vendors, many of them family businesses — a United Nations of Food, which is a favorite saying around here. One Asian supplier is second-generation American; his father came from Taiwan in 1950. A Chicago-based South Asian food broker still owns farms in India.
"You learn something about the world every day," says Paul Fischesser, an international food buyer. Both he and Hann are constantly being fed by customers wielding plastic containers of home concoctions made from a Jungle Jim ingredient, be it Jufran Banana Ketchup or Mork Dark Syrup.
"I'm a firm believer that you have to taste it to sell it. You can't be afraid to try something," Hann says. "The worst that happens is you spit it out."
"Pinpoint research"
Though Bonaminio doesn't discuss sales numbers, everyone talks of "pinpoint research" that minimizes waste and overpurchasing by analyzing the store's clientele — 1.6 million customers each year. The olive bar alone does $5,000 a week in business.
Clearly this involves more than just ethnic customers. And the employees of Jungle Jim's are thrilled at the mainstreaming of what they do best. It's internationalism, American-style: good business that helps people, too.
Bonaminio turns his attention to what might happen if the "British Isles" section grew. More music, maybe an interactive game. Maybe even animatronic versions of historical figures to guide customers toward their McVitie's Jaffa Cakes and Maynard's Wine Gums. Margaret Thatcher? Henry VIII? Gerry and the Pacemakers?
Somewhere in Karachi, Pakistan, at D-112 Naurus Road, they're cranking out containers of Ahmed Mango Chutney. At Kioi-chi-Chiyoda-Ku in Tokyo, House Foods manufactures the unlikely Vermont Curry ("hot ... with apples and honey"). And on 214 Spanish Town Road in Kingston, Jamaica, the refreshing grapefruit beverage known as Ting is born.
You'd have to travel 15,000 miles to collect these products from their birthplaces. But there they are, all within a few feet of each other in Jungle Jim's: everything Mom used to make — whether she was making it in Iowa or Ireland, Massachusetts or Mauritania or Mongolia.
There's no turning back. In Lancaster, Pa., where Giant Food Markets is a dominant supermarket chain, people refer to the downtown branch as the "Spanish Giant" because it stocks scads of Hispanic produce and packaged food. Olive Garden restaurants are sending chefs to Italy to learn authentic cooking. On the Food Network, chefs Ming Tsai and Emeril Lagasse are at the vanguard of cooks turning ethnic dishes into home-cooked meals. And in New York, a takeout menu in midtown Manhattan advertises "El Nido's Delicious Pan Pizza and Indian Specialties."
Whatever's on the horizon, be it lutefisk lo mein or haggis vindaloo, Jim Bonaminio isn't worried. If the world wants it, he'll find it and sell it. If it comforts customers, all the better.
And if a few Joika Fried Venison Meatballs in Creamy Sauce washed down with sake help someone realize Norwegians and Japanese are more like us than we think — well, that's just fine, too.
"Maybe it helps us be just a bit more tolerant," says Hann, the international foods manager. "I'd like to think so."
Maybe it has even transcended tolerance. While much of the world lacks enough to eat, we live in a nation of abundance. The poor in Calcutta and Lagos can't get five kinds of fresh papaya, much less pay for it. Yet in an age of consumerism when Americans express themselves by buying, perhaps speaking with the wallet — and, through it, the stomach — is the true bellwether of cultural acceptance.
Because you could argue that all the exotic stuff on the shelves of Jungle Jim's — the boxes of Pocky, the Mauby Drink Concentrate, the ghee and the bok choy — is slowly, steadily becoming as local as the people who eat it all.
It's no longer foreign. It's ours.
It's as American as Vermont curry.