Dairy Archetype

Walking into Olive Supermarket, the smells overcome you. Immediately upon entering, aisles of fresh produce are presented in boxes and in chilled shelves. A large box full of huge jackfruit starts your walk down the produce section. This fruit has green flesh covered with bumps the diameter of a pencil’s eraser tip and the fruit ranges from one to two-foot-long and weighs probably five to ten pounds. Down the aisles in the chilled produce shelves, banana flowers, long beans, leeks and many vegetables and fruits that are not in traditional Western supermarkets or grocery stores like Walmart, Target or Aldi lay out. To the right are crates filled with various vegetables and fruits, most intriguing, a “big taro” which is an elongated fruit with

One note to take is that this supermarket had lots of soy milk. This kind of milk is secondary at western stores and I found that it was cool that soy milk was more of the normal dairy beverage at the Asian supermarket. Observing the dairy aisle, a lady strolled down the aisles with a large bag of fresh bean sprouts. This was very so intriguing to the eye as the bag was probably 4-foot-tall and as wide as two people. Bean sprouts are my favorite ingredient in lo mein and hibachi noodles so this was a sight for me. Down an aisle, there was something very familiar. The store had a rack of vegetable seeds. The reason I noticed this is because it is something that could connect with me. My family has a big garden and grows vegetables for the local farmer’s market and we buy our seed in bulk. We sell whatever extra seed we do not use on eBay in small packs similar to what the supermarket was selling. It was neat to see that they sell vegetable seeds. This should not have been such a surprise to me, but it was just very unexpected and connected with me and my personal

Tea of all kinds lined the shelves of the aisle. Tea with colorful and gorgeous packaging, tea with eighty different names and tea wherever your eyes wandered. A glass jar of “dried rose” tea caught my attention; it contained shriveled up roses in little balls. Surely rose tea must be good. A big detail to notice was that all the tea was all boxed uniquely. Some of the tea were just in a cardboard box wrapped in plastic, whereas some of the other brands of tea were in metal tins or in decorative jars. It makes me wonder the importance of tea plays in the culture and if it is important or not to store your tea in decorative ceramic and glass jars or durable metal tins. Interestingly enough, during the Tang dynasty, tea-drinking “became a nationwide custom from south to north (China)” (Ceresa). In fact, tea promoted health benefits and was drank “for its stimulant properties to keep (people) mentally alert during meditation” (Ceresa). The drink exploded in society and people began to thrive on it economically and in consumption. It was to a point where people “would always carry their tea utensils with them” (Ceresa) including a tea bowl (cup). The eventual invention of the tea-pot became because of this time in ancient China. Since the market for tea boomed, tea gardens became extremely popular and the Ming-Qing period recognized that since tea was such a big component in people’s lives, they decided to make the product tax-free