“Walk north out of your room, follow the walking path past the snail, cross the street and head across the lawn until you get to Pocahontas, then turn left and you have arrived at the kibbutz store.”
The kibbutz store is an interesting place. It is a small community store that manages to carry the most essential and still the most random goods one could need. At first glance, the setting feels familiar: walk through the doors to face four aisles in front. The check out is on the left next to an ice cream refrigerator, which sits across from a table of cookies, crackers, and desserts that tempt customers as they walk in on the right. The aisles are organized by the items it carries: overpriced cereals and dry breakfast foods on the far right are adjacent to the teas, coffees, and condiments, followed by canned and jarred foods, then finally cosmetics and toiletries. A small produce room sits to the far left and the walls are lined with refrigerated goods.
Closer inspection reveals a few miscalculations that I had both entering Israel and on my inaugural visit to the kibbutz store. First, my fears of not having access to my most essential food group, peanut butter, were sufficiently quelled. Before arriving in Israel, and noting the forewarned European skepticism towards the tasty creamy (or crunchy) goodness, I was so concerned about parting with peanut butter that I brought my own. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Every meal is appropriately equipped with at least one jar and if this isn’t enough, the kibbutz store is well stocked with three different brands. In a store barely larger than the 4 by 4 squares we are digging, in a land where olives, hummus, and unidentified spreads abound, this caught me by surprise. Next, I am at a loss to find my most frequent vehicle for peanut butter, bananas, despite the endless acres of banana trees that line the roads to Cesaria Maritima. But for all the bananas that I have not found, the kibbutz store makes up tenfold in quantities of olives and instant coffee. Together every variety of these two commodities occupy an entire half of an aisle.
Soon after orienting myself around the store, I came upon my most fateful blunder. Upon arriving in Israel, one of my first observations was that it is very easy to communicate in English. Most people speak English and signs, directions, and labels are printed in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, so I thought finding the products I wanted would be easy. But this, too, turned out to be a slight miscalculation. I was in search of some yogurt as I wandered to the back of the store. On most products, while the branding and images look familiar, the names are given in Hebrew and Arabic, but only a few are translated into English. In the dairy section, I found single serving cups adjacent to larger four serving containers of what I presumed to be yogurt next to the cottage cheese that we often have at second breakfast in the field. I decided on some white creamy looking dairy product with a blue label and nice cows grazing in the image on the front.
When I got back to my room, I tried my mystery dairy: tangier than most plain yogurts I’ve eaten but similar in consistency to the Greek yogurt that I live on at home. Perhaps different bacterial cultures, my roommates and I surmised after passing around the strange white stuff, and not bad with a little cereal and honey thrown on top. Not having much of an aversion to any food, I didn’t mind this funny tasting yogurt and lived on it for breakfast for a few days. I did this until one afternoon, when I talked with a graduate student square supervisor who mentioned in an off-hand comment how funny it is that even though Israel is geographically close to Greece, Greek yogurt is nowhere to be found. If Israel has no Greek yogurt, then what have I been eating for days? I still have not discovered what my mystery product was, but to be honest I am too afraid to find out. I now stick to the clearly marked single serving Yoplaits which, as far as I can tell, contain the dairy product I desire. Still, I continue to feel a slight exhilaration with every purchase I make at the kibbutz store, as I never know with absolute certainty that the product I buy is what I anticipate. Perhaps I should look into that “hair conditioner” I bought last week…