Smell My Feet

There are three types of grocery stores in the south:

1. The Uppity Grocer: a store full of lots of ingredients that you have no idea how to pronounce, let alone be able to afford to buy. These store can easily be identified by their display of cheeses, truffle oils and fancy people behind the meat counter who may have actually met the cow you are about to buy thanks to a tour of the organic beef farm.

2. The Middle Class Grocer: this is usually a large chain store that offers the usual fare with a few specialty sections of organic, vegetarian and gluten-free offerings. You know you're in a middle-class store when their generic brands have fancy labels to make you feel better about the fact you are really buying the rejects of the brand-name foods.

3. The Country Grocer: this store is usually found in an abandoned shopping center where a middle class grocery used to be located. Due to the giant jars of pickled foods, you really have to watch your kids so they don't ruin the pig's feet display.

I tend to shop at option two when restocking our cabinets, and those fancy generic labels really do make my pantry look very delectable. But when I'm looking for foods to feed my girls, I make a trip to the country store. A middle class or uppity grocery would never have all of the animal parts for sale that I use to make up my girls' raw diet. You can't find backs, necks, gizzards, livers or hearts at the normal meat counter - middle class folks might get scared. But at the country grocery store, they have all this - and more.

Yep, I said more. For the first time ever at a commercial grocery store - country or otherwise - I purchased a package of chicken feet for the girls to nibble on. Chicken feet, while attached to a live bird, aren't the prettiest things to look at. Chicken feet detached and piled into one of those butcher trays and wrapped in plastic wrap is down right gross and creepy. Even worse, is looking at a display full of them.

I really don't want to know who buys these other than people who feed raw. I'm pretty sure that anyone who practices voodoo or witchcraft would need the feet from a live bird and not those that are packaged, but maybe I'm wrong.

Nonetheless, my girls enjoy their mid-day snack, talons and all. But I've asked them not to get too used to such a delicacy. I really don't like seeing these things clawing to get out of the plastic bag in the bottom of my fridge every time I go to get a drink.