Searching for Sour Cream on the South End

My crew loves sour cream. We keep a big tub of it at the kitchen and we use it to fill a smaller tub to bring to the markets to eat with our own tamales and quesadillas. But yesterday we were out of sour cream at the kitchen so we couldn't bring any to Columbia City.

The first two hours of Columbia City tend to be slow and I usually bring a book and sit in the park and read, waiting for the dinner rush. Yesterday I told the crew I'd go find them some sour cream. It's the kind of errand I enjoy: exploring a neighborhood on foot with an atypical agenda as a way to see a place in a new way. I also like doing little things for my staff that can make a big difference to their morale.

I knew there was a Safeway about 8 blocks north of the market, but I figured I'd be able to find closer sour cream at one of the many convenience stores just south of the market. First I visited the Shola Ethiopian grocery on S. Edmunds. It's the closest food store to the market and I've gone in there over the years when I've forgotten to bring cooking oil. They had fresh injera bread (the spongy stuff that you use to scoop up those tasty Ethiopian dishes.) They had raw coffee beans, whole cinnamon sticks and cardamom pods, and even ghee in their refrigerated section. But no sour cream.

Next I visited the Busy Bee grocery, which had mainly processed convenience foods. I also found another 3 or 4 Halal groceries rich with traditional Middle Eastern, Indian and North African products, but I did not find sour cream.

After walking 6 blocks, I turned back empty handed. I finally did find some sour cream ("crema") at a Mexican grocery that I had passed over on my way south because it looked like it just had mercantile products.

I thought about the term "food desert", often used to describe inner city areas whose main sources of food are overpriced convenience stores that carry very few healthy options. These stores had virtually no fresh vegetables (and no sour cream). But they did carry plenty of grains and legumes, which are relatively healthy, affordable, unprocessed foods that tend to get short shrift in discussions of food security such as Joel Berg's All You Can Eat, and Mark Winne's Closing the Food Gap.

It would have been nice to see some fresh vegetables (and some sour cream.) But I walked away from the experience feeling, again, like nothing is as simple as it seems.