Will anyone admit that when going gets tough, the heartily tough go shopping? Grocery stores simply warm my heart and fuel dynamism for the day. How about wearing a hat from, say, a century ago? One wearing the hat has a prism through which to look at a unique building “Where You’re Someone Special Every Day,” and on Hawai’i Island this is KTA, a favorite place for my family and I to source diverse food. Writing this essay I am during February’s last week of the year 2025. What if an island visitor airplaned in from 1925 and I was her KTA tour guide?

How in the world and where in the store might I even begin? I’m in a communication glut where what is absent is knowing what the hell is going on and feeling emotional hurt, intentionally designed, so I need this tour guide gig. Simultaneously true is that all is easygoing these days so desperate is a word avoided in my vocabulary future forward. But let’s be real that when you are working a fatigued heart surely KTA is the way. Let’s discover what we have inside.

Our 1925er could be anyone and for today let’s welcome Mathilda who is my mother’s mother also known as my grandmother. Imagine from our modern prism looking back how one petite woman gave birth to 15 children (go right on and fall off your chair), raising mostly all food sustenance directly from her land surrounding several acres called a Tving farm in Sweden’s garden state, the southern Blekinge. Let one example speak for the volume of food production necessary for what evolved to be three sibling packs, each one of five kids, growing up together in bunches.

The detail is that an entire cabin space was built for baking bread. Picture a small cottage and in one corner a floor to ceiling brick oven. Wood bread paddles are eight feet long to shuffle up and over each of the multiple bread loaves baking at the same time on one cement platform. Milk, eggs, cheese, vegetables, cakes, and various more edibles all arrived from the few minutes a brief walk outside the house front door takes and the return walk inside again.

Probably a good guess of mine that you already know grocery shopping today as an entire world distant from the world of food farm acreage at Tving. Since Mathilda was born in the later 1800s, for today’s excursion strolling KTA grocery aisles, she is well-over 100 years old. A walker I have ready for our sauntering. As I myself continue to age (who knew?), I’m more impatient so I won’t be coddling her along. She has to make her way—and keep up with me. Still, my empathy lenses widen as I grow older and with these, I predict Grandma’s expected culture shock. Hence, we are beelining for the vegetable and fruit “department” first, a familiarity zone. These she will recognize. And this is where we meet Melissa.

She is the woman who grows baby beets in Normandy, France and has them shipped or airplaned to Los Angeles for cargo boat or airplane express to a Big Island truck that hauls them beets on a narrow island road to where I sit now. We have a few steps to go before encountering beets. For this instant, we are outdoors on a balmy tropics day where I am perched at a small table just outside KTA grocery’s electronic door. Mathilda asked me to explain the door gizmo and I refocused her on our guided tour purpose; a slight squabble on priorities and reconciled quickly, we did. The tour guide goal then achieved witnessing that Melissa has delivered beets across 7,000+ miles to sit vacuum air packed in thick plastic sealed in a cardboard box. Mathilda stands before them and stares.

She asks me if those beets are the same ones she easily grows in her vegetable rows, bounty enough to sell at local markets? My hasty reply is yes exactly one and the same. Hearty news is that a handful of beets are for sale (no plastic or cardboard wrap, dustily soil coated), a harvest grown in the USA meaning on the mainland some several thousand miles away. Plenty of lettuce choices organized well, too, from a farm in Waimea just those 20 miles close. Food proximity is possible then. Still, most of the produce has been flown, trained, trucked, and boated from a few thousand or more miles away.

Closing the separation between local farmers on their land and customers in their local grocery store, whereas the healthy vegetables could be their bond, is not an inexplicable I can explain for Mathilda. She is standing muted in front of broccolini going for $12 a pound. Despite her quizzical looking, I am keeping the flow a go. Why local communities are cleaved from vegetables being grown and fruit trees producing is too lengthy a narrative for this brisk tour. Coffee after our grocery store tour might help. Onward we go store surveying.

At a long line of Bok choy cabbages, I reach for a stalk of mustard greens; these are optimally spicy when sauteed. Yet are not so familiar in Mathilda’s Sweden vegetable farm. The mustard greens have such a peppery flavor kick even brown rice or a few slivers of chicken are side dishes. The mustard greens is the center meal. Mathilda agrees that we purchase for dinner. Turning around, myriad potato varieties beckon. Here is her familiar expertise.

Potatoes and Sweden are synonymous. And in Hawai’i the ube (purple potato) is familiar but new for my island visitor and so in the basket a few go. Ube grows fantastically well on the Hawaiian Islands. Still, we have the local and the globally travelled placed next to each other. In a neatly organized arrangement, close to potatoes of all varieties, are Korean pears wrapped in decorative foam wrap and tied with twine. Each one. Grapefruit sized, the bill is $3.49 a pound. Or $7 per pear since a few pounds is a common weight.

Freshly harvested ginger roots are unrecognizable for her until I describe the flavor, and she announces a tea that she drinks having ginger. We are starting to share a language. She doesn’t even hesitate to scoop a pineapple from the stack and place it in our food basket. At $6 we are comfortably good on dinner’s last course being affordable given the low cost and low travel having flown over from proximity land called Oahu, a few islands close, 30 minutes on an airplane.

Leaving vegetables and fruit land, we reach one entire stretch of aisle having a start where your feet stand until reaching the last shelf at my 5’5” arm stretch. Shelved there are a focused food topic: chips of every variety possible. Maybe eighty different kinds. The entire aisle. A question she has pep in her step for is asking “What is the purpose of so many?” This time I make a leap of intellectual faith. “You know, a sense of America as the land of choices, I guess. And profits.”

She reaches for a familiar selection and that is a bag of plain pork rinds. Agreed we are on this choice and abundance is in the works. A tour guide needs sustenance after all. If we turn directly around, and we do, on the other aisle for the entire stretch is every variety of candy sold. Countless varieties of chocolates and bagged candies like starbursts and multicolored neon wrapped sweets—the view inundates our senses—and we decide gladly to leave this zone on our grocery store tour.

In a cubby hole tucked inside a corner and sequestered in a large grocery store is a pharmacy. The shelving closest to the pharmacy wall window, where you order or receive medicine, is an aisle of energy bars, those fabricated ways of acquiring nutrients that might, scandalously enough, have arrived from many of the food choices in the fruit and vegetable section. Instead, we have trendy high-sugar bars while the next shelf over is jammed with vitamin bottles. Infinitely repeating the same 45 rpm (rotations per minute) record spin that food is medicine seems too obvious to share with Mathilda since her entire life she grew and cultivated her own nutrition. The phrase farm to table is trite when compared to real necessity. Paradox remains that “basic” cultivated food has more nutrition than most “modern” food in KTA. Waving a friendly hello to pharmacists dressed in white lab coats, we meander on.

Devoted space, where an aisle turns a corner, is an entire column of themed foods. Cuisines classic to specific cultures are ones shared worldwide today. We have our Mexican corridor with masa (make tamales from scratch), various canned beans, salsas, picante sauces and more. In another location Mathilda takes initiative to ponder the Hawaiian column. This culture corridor hosts all flavors Hawaiian or many uptakes in heat, salt, and ono (delicious in Hawaiian) often reliably shaken, stirred, sprinkled and added to island prepared foods. This is a task not small for Hawai’i is a culinary polyglot, the recipes spoken in Chinese, Filipino, Hispanic, Japanese, Portuguese, and history’s honoring words called Native Hawaiian. Poi has nutrition abundance and is indigenous to the islands since taro was and is a primary staple crop. The taro bulb to make poi is sold at this KTA in the vegetable and fruit section. Did I already play that 45-record singing lyrical on food is medicine at the same rpm?

Swiveling in a new direction from where we stand, Mathilda considers a woman and a man, colleagues paired in a small space, hunched over a long, narrow table. I wave my hand, after you, and a stroll in our roll is happening. A da kine sushi center has appeared! The chefs are snugly placed behind several sushi signs and just visible at their work. Avocado rolls will pair well with the pork rinds, so I grab two servings. Sushi and pork rinds just go oh, so well together. The crackling of sushi questions that I see behind Mathilda’s eyes are ones I will address later when we have a table space for talk story. Direct is her step anyway in the deli direction. Now I am following her. Grandma’s a quick study.

Behind the plexiglass are sandwich fixings galore: roast beef (several kinds), ham, turkey, salami, and cheeses in various colors and textures. Sweden is a defining queen of the open face sandwich. A cup of strong coffee and a sandwich is as familiar as a sunset or a sunrise—countable on. My Grandma’s confidence has taken on a Hawaiian rolling wave for she points to Swiss cheese and roast beef. A hefty package of each is served with a smile when our deli clerk hands the veritable cuisine over the counter.

Yet some potential strife on our guided tour for perilously close is the bakery as in a few steps adjacent. If potatoes are synonymous with Sweden, then so are pastries and cakes. She is starting to browse and so I’m gently ushering (redirecting?) her over to Kusina Ni Emma or Emma’s Kitchen, a Filipino takeout location happily situated inside this KTA grocery store. (I’m a fan of going back to “Emma” given our history disputing ketchup varieties; check out previous essay post.) Staring at the array of plate options, I’ll confess a few I recognize, but many are for a Filipino food research dining adventure. More than a few recipes are new to my culinary grazing. Today I purchased garlic peanuts, a familiar $5 purchase that immerses roasted peanuts in granular salt and toasted garlic.

Strategic redirecting is a success and we are returning on our walk to the familiar. We wander again near the sushi centre, over to where vitamins and a pharmacy unwittingly are a stand in for healthy food, and back to where that is a direct option—the fruit and vegetable corner. Mathilda wishes to purchase yellow onions because she usually fries a portion to go with boiled potatoes and she had forgotten to get them when we began.

When Mathilda and I go to close our grocery bonanza tour, the same shopping expedition where you are someone special everyday at KTA, I have saved the locality aisle. Since corporate food projects are ubiquitous nationwide—Lay’s potato chips, anyone?—what fascinates me are the singular details just this one store carries. And at this Waikoloa KTA we have an entire tourism memorabilia section. Dozens of reminders of how one week was spent lounging pool or ocean side are shelved before us. And plenty material support to enjoy the leisure time: slippahs, sunscreen, towels, and wide-brimmed hats. For those who endeavor an ocean interaction, miscellaneous fishing gear are ready to purchase.

While traveling, when I arrive at a new grocery store, I usually make a beeline for this aisle. Locals proudly display coffee mugs, bumper stickers, scarves, and one time in a Wasco store, a central California city, I saw a real-live replica of the Joad’s truck from Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath. (Not for sale the truck.) This detail arriving now at the keyboard makes sense since I read the novel in a Sweden family home a few miles from Mathilda’s farm. And the fiction work narrates families surviving and not surviving poverty during America’s Great Depression. Especially fear of starvation being a reality because severe lack of nutrition was there. My Mom emphasizes that she and her 14 siblings counted on food and did not have a fear of a day without, but the work process to cultivate an entire menu beyond the front door in those vegetable acres, and through bartering with neighbors for the rest, was colossal effort.

And when I have fray in one of my days, I rely on imagination to go grateful. Sitting at a table outside KTA where inside the store massive abundance exists and I have the financial wherewithal to purchase what I need and splurges, too, historical comparison reminds me of my money privilege. Across our economic divide, I can still creatively see a woman like Mathilda strolling across the diverse food choices that are too many and too devoid of nutrition and she would wonder why. As do I. We have this in common.

And food alleviates the moment because simply a food splurge eases the soul’s work. Relying on spiritual tools mitigates what I find as Cadillac problems in my life (luxury level even if resonates like emotional bullying), because showing up reliable is my day’s work. While consumerism is quite not my thing, idly strolling grocery aisles is. A healthy tour guide day then. And I recognize that hundreds of devoted farmers are growing amazing food on Big Island, truly. Yet our modern food relationships are works in progress not perfection that is for sure.

While I carried my grocery bag out of KTA and started walking on a path towards a Thai food lunch (really was one of those days), I pictured Mathilda. Meeting her in person I did not in my lifetime, yet her aura has traveled and reached my life many times. Her daughters and granddaughters have shared poignant anecdotes. Imagine Mathilda when she had a few minutes to sit with a strong cup of coffee at her kitchen table, a thick slice of the amazing bread she baked, and a swipe of fresh butter—these are the simplicity historical times in our lives for gratitude sustenance.