Supermarkets

GBP£250 wheel of cheese
- more than a month's
 minimum wage

I like cooking, maybe more than I like eating, and a major adaptation I am making in Brazil is to the food options here. As a result, I’ve spent far too much time in supermarkets since I arrived, praying to find those elusive sun dried tomatoes, or hoping for some halloumi. Food here is generally expensive, and often of a poor quality in the supermarkets. Cereal is simply sugar, in different shapes. The markets, as elsewhere, offer some excellent value and quality.

'Cereal'

In supermarkets cheese is half the price if you buy it pre-sliced and pre-packaged, but you only get a few slices. ‘Mozarella’ is hard and salty. And there is no cheddar, halloumi, feta, Wensleydale, brie, camembert, stilton…..

Fruit is plentiful, but often of a poor quality - supermarkets are generally not the place to buy fruit. Vegetables are sadly lacking, which continues to disappoint me.

So many olives, so few sun dried tomatoes

The queues are not huge, but deceptive. They take forever. Everything is done in slow motion, and in between chatting. The checkout assistant, bagging agent, and the customer, have all the time in the world. I’ve mentioned before about the guy who drank 3 beers in the queue. It would happen more often if the majority of people weren’t evangelical. 

11 bags of shopping?

The plastic bags are designed to carry marshmallows or polystyrene (not both), so you only have a couple of items per bag, or it’s double bagging. 1.5 million plastic bags are distributed in Brazil per hour. 2.4 billion plastic bags are consumed each month in the state of Sao Paulo alone.

Bagging assistants will pack a few small items across 7-8 bags - the cost obviously doesn’t have the cost deducted from their measly wage.

At least they’re not restricted by rigid health and safety regulations though. Here buckets of water are thrown over the floor without warning, in a packed supermarket, while they clean the floor. 

One thing that does work is the priority queue, for the elderly or pregnant. It tends to be respected across supermarkets, banks, other shops, and parking spaces. 

It’s common to leave a machete amongst the veg to help customers cut to size the mandioca they require. And there is often one member of staff on rollerskates to co-ordinate the queue management.

Oh, and “French bread” is a crusty roll, not a baguette. Still very nice though.