Susan Orlean's "All Mixed Up"

Alexandra Schwartz’s recent “Bounty Hunters” (The New Yorker, November 25, 2019), an account of her experience working at Park Slope Food Co-op, in Brooklyn, reminded me of another great “grocery store” piece – Susan Orlean’s “All Mixed Up” (The New Yorker, June 22, 1992; included in Orlean’s 2004 My Kind of Place). It’s about Sunshine Market, a grocery store in Jackson Heights, Queens. Orlean wonderfully captures the complexity of “grocery store” reality. Here, for example, is her description of the start of a delivery day:

One Monday morning, I got to the market at seven forty-five – fifteen minutes before opening time. There were already trucks from Polaner/B&G Pickles, Ingegneri & Son, Pepsi-Cola, Damascus Bakery, and Star Soap and Prayer Candle parked out front. The B&G driver, Wally Wadsworth, had started his morning at B&G’s warehouse in Roseland, New Jersey, and was delivering sweet gherkin midgets and kosher dills. Jimmy Penny, the Ingegneri driver, had come from a warehouse in the Bronx with fifty cases of assorted groceries. Ronnie Chamberlain and Chris Laluz had started in Long Island and had Pepsi liters. Jim Hazar had come from the Damascus Bakery in Brooklyn, with fresh pita bread. Manny Ziegelman, of Star Soap and Prayer Candle, had also come from Brooklyn. This particular morning, he had a mixed case of Miraculous Mother, Lucky Buddha, and Fast Luck prayer candles for Sunshine Market in his truck. 

Orlean talks to Sunshine Market’s owner, Herb Spitzer (“Herb is now sixty years old. He is a medium-size man with a smooth, pinkish, egg-shaped face and a scramble of graying hair. He has a soothing, precise manner, which suggests benevolence and intelligence and absolutely no patience for goofing around”). She visits Herb in his office above the trash compactor at the back of the store (“The trash compactor runs, off and on, all day long. Conversations in the office that begin in a normal speaking tone often shift in a shout at some point”). She talks to the store’s manager, Toney Murphy (“Toney knows everything. Toney even knows some things he doesn’t know, like Spanish”). She attends the store’s tenth birthday party in Herb’s office (“There were eight people clustered in the corner of the office: Ashima, Marta, Rose Mary, Jerry, Robert, Toney, and Richard and Bill, who had taken a break from carving a side of beef”). She talks to Jerry Goldberg, the store’s produce manager (“He has huge hands, with fingers as gnarled as parsnips. It is quite a sight to wander back to his worktable and catch him hacking at the lettuce heads, cutting off the ugly leaves and tossing them away. A few heads into it, he’s ankle deep in greenery”). She visits the butchers and wrappers in the cutting room:

Lack of sentimentality may actually be an advantage when you’re spending eight hours a day around carcasses. Once, Bill, who is the meat manager, was telling me what I thought was going to be a sweet story about a little old lady who approached him one Thanksgiving for advice on cooking her bird. His summation: “I said to her, ‘Hey, lady, you’re seventy-two bleeping years old. I’m sure this isn’t your first turkey.’ ”

“All Mixed Up” is a triumph of close observation and detailed description. Revisiting it twenty-seven years after it first appeared, I enjoyed it immensely.