We bought everything off a complete stranger's grocery list

that's not a weird thing to do at all

Good day, clowns!

Davida and I were out running errands in the suburbs a few weekends ago, when we decided on a whim to go to the zoo.

Shit, did I say zoo? My bad, I meant Costco. It was a Saturday, which in retrospect probably wasn’t the smartest idea. As you all probably know, Costco is a circus on the weekends, probably because everyone and their 18 grandmas seems to go shopping together with the same lost expression on their faces (ourselves included).

I grabbed the first cart I could get my grubby little hands on, and we pushed bravely into the store. Once we were finally able to merge out of cart highway traffic into one of those glorious warehouse aisles, I saw Davida reach gingerly into the cart to pick something up.

“It’s someone’s grocery list,” she said.

I had my head on a swivel, trying my best not to collide with other shoppers, and asked, “What’s on it?”

She rattled off a few items. “Blueberries. Pasta. Garbage bags.”

“Let’s take it home and I’ll look at it later,” I said, hoisting a bulk package of toilet paper into the cart, in anticipation of 3,000 guests coming over to take a dump. “Maybe there’s a dinner idea on there somewhere or something.”

Years later, we eventually got out of there, and when we got home, Davida put the list on our table, where it sat for a while. I came across it again recently when I was sorting through some mail, and finally got a chance to look closer at it.

The list appeared to be written on a blank empty envelope that was meant for a child’s birthday celebration, which indicated to me that these groceries were originally meant for a family of some sort.

The handwriting on the front was in cursive (like the ancient times), and fortunately, it was pretty legible. Here’s what the list said, in its exact order:

• Milk

• Blueberries

• Mac Cream

• Pasta

• Ground beef

• Ritz Crackers

• Ice cream

• Frozen berries

• Cereal - Cheerios (the “Cheerios” was underlined)

• Oat meal [sic]

• Pancake syrup

• Garbage bags

• Coconut water

As far as I could tell, this family was particularly passionate about dairy products, berries, and carbohydrates, considering they were purchasing all of these things at a warehouse club. And apparently they were allergic to vegetables of any sort, since there were none on this list whatsoever. There was also no seasoning of any kind here either, which I also found fascinating, nor was there any convenience food like frozen pizza, Costco’s famous $4.99 rotisserie chicken, or a 24 oz. container of “Bitchin’ Sauce,” which is a thing I always see at our local Costco.

Then I said to myself, “Dannis Ree, food writers often talk at great lengths about how food is like a universal language. Perhaps you could conduct an experiment and see what it’s like to live in this family’s shoes by purchasing what’s on their entire grocery list.”

I thought that this sociological experiment could teach me about how my fellow Americans live. Not everyone can enjoy the luxuries of Mike’s Hard Sausage and A5 Wagyu Hamburger Helper constantly, like we do in our household. I wanted to know what it felt like to not eat hot garbage all the time. I wanted to know what it felt like to be… a real boy.

So I headed to the store to purchase every single item on the list (minus the few odd things we already had), and to live a mile in someone else’s normal kitchen for once.

First of all, before I begin, no, I didn’t return to Costco to do this.

It’s just Davida and I, along with our two dumbass cats, so we don’t really have need for any of these items in bulk. Though I did consider doing it this way. It would have been hilariously expensive and hard to lug around, and I do not make a million dollars per newsletter yet. So I just went to the regular grocery store for human-sized packages of stuff.

As you can see, the list was pretty innocuous, starting with milk, blueberries, and cream. What’s interesting about the cream is that it appeared as if the person writing this list had initially appeared to start writing the word “macaroni,” but had scratched that out in favor of the word “cream.”

Mysteries were already starting to form. And I had to guess what type of cream, too. After some mulling in front of the dairy case, I ended up getting some heavy whipping cream, because that seemed to make the most sense.

Then there was pasta, ground beef, and Ritz Crackers, which, okay, didn’t scream anything out of the ordinary to me.

Although I do appreciate this family’s brand loyalty, considering the list specified Ritz Crackers in particular.

After all, there’s nothing like the buttery flavor of a Ritz Cracker. They’re delicious, and are always good with things like deli meat, cheese, or caulk spread on top.

[This was me attempting to endorse Ritz Crackers for a potential brand partnership for the newsletter. Was that too little or too much? Cough up that Big Cracker money, dickholes. Daddy needs some new hubcaps.]

Next on the list was ice cream, frozen berries, and Cheerios.

The type of ice cream wasn’t specified, but considering berries had showed up on the shopping list twice already, I figured I’d turn this into a hat trick and buy strawberry. The Cheerios were clearly important too, because they were underlined on the shopping list.

To me that signaled that whoever bought the groceries last time forgot to buy the fucking Cheerios and caused some kind of household disaster. Was it because eating Cheerios can help you lower your cholesterol? Are Cheerios the only kind of cereal the children will eat? Wait, do the kids have high cholesterol? Is it from the ground beef?

And again with the brand loyalty. These people know what they want. It’s General Mills or a cereal bowl full of nothing but berries!!!

The last three food items on the list were oatmeal, pancake syrup, and coconut water.

I already had some steel cut oats on hand from the bowl of oatmeal I made inspired by “The Humpty Dance” the other week, so I was good in that department. Interesting. Cheerios, oatmeal, this really is a heart-healthy family.

What got me about the pancake syrup is that it was specifically listed as “pancake syrup.”

Notice it didn’t say “maple syrup,” which they happen to sell at Costco for a really good price. So in my mind, pancake syrup meant the delicious cheap corn syrup-based shit, which I consider the nectar of the gods. Fuck that miraculous shit that comes out of trees. And hey, maybe the pancake syrup was for the Ritz Crackers; they’re shaped like pancakes.

And the only non-food item was garbage bags, which we already had plenty of at home, and will likely have for the rest of our lives.

Man, I don’t want to judge people I don’t know, but I take it this family isn’t really into food all that much. Barring any health or diet considerations (they don’t appear to be gluten-free or vegetarian), it’s literally just carbs, milky stuff, a little beef, and berries. Again, we did find this list at Costco, which means these are staple items they’re getting, but they could have tossed in a bag of Doritos for themselves or us or something. How inconsiderate that they didn’t know they would be dictating our diet too.

I’ll chalk their selection up to Midwestern tastes, I guess. Hopefully whoever was doing the shopping managed to stop by the food court for a whole pepperoni pizza or a hot dog shoved into a chicken bake or something.

But now, there’s the matter of Davida and I having to eat through all these groceries, and if you’re wondering where the food experiment is, don’t worry, one’s absolutely coming next Friday. Because it could just be that every one of these ingredients was actually part of one master dish. I mean, the list was written on a kid’s birthday envelope, who’s to say this isn’t to surprise Junior with their favorite, uh, coconut water oatmeal with meat and pancake syrup on their birthday?

You’ll just have to wait impatiently and find out what I’m cooking up. And no, I’m not looking forward to this. But as the greatest food writer in all of history, it is my duty to dig deep into the psyche of my fellow humans.

Food is a universal language, after all.

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Man, I can’t believe I actually went and bought all this shit off someone else’s shopping list. Who does that?!

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