I am a kid at heart. I’m not talking about my tendency to like cartoons and fart jokes, but the other thing. You know, the thing where you think you know everything about something because you read about it or saw it on tv? Let’s just say that I read a lot of books about the cruising life before we left, and I was pretty sure I knew everything.
You may be surprised to find out that I was wrong. It seems that the vision that I built up in my head from all my “research” was a little off. Let’s take food, for example:
Vision: maybe a nice piece of tropical fruit for breakfast, a light lunch, and fresh caught grilled fish for dinner
Reality: cereal for breakfast, ramen or a sandwich for lunch, and prepackaged jambalaya for dinner. Snacks are either cheese-its or trail mix.
We try. We really do. But it’s hard to have the healthy stuff on hand, hence the reality gap. It has a bit to do with storage, but mostly our habits are governed by the grocery shopping that we’re able to do.
Shopping was a thing of beauty when we lived on land. If we ran out of fruit, we’d add it to our shopping list. The next time we had a few minutes, we would hop in our car and drive to the store. There were several large, well stocked grocery stores nearby to choose from. Once there we would find an abundant produce section to fulfill our every desire. Strawberries in November? You betcha. The kids gotta have strawberries. There was an occasional pang of guilt if the store was out of organic. What do we do? The kids might grow horns if we buy non organic! Never fear, there are organic raspberries. They’ll just have to cope this week. We pick the ripest option, so that we can enjoy our bounty immediately when we get home. If they go bad, we can just pop back over to the store and get more.
Sigh. Let’s look at the same scenario on the boat. First of all, we don’t simply “go to the store”. We “provision”. Yes, it’s enough of a pain that we have our very own word for it. Second, there is no “if we are out of fruit”. We are always out of fruit. It’s got a permanent spot on our shopping list, with a hopeful yet cynical little question mark next to it.
Shopping List
- Milk?
- Fruit?
- Bread?
The next time we anchor near something resembling a town, we head to shore in our inflatable raft of a dinghy to look for a store. First, we have to appoint a dinghy captain to drain the water and pump up the air. Greyson is usually first to volunteer, because he knows he’ll get to drive. Next, we have to find a dock to tie to. This isn’t like finding a parking spot at the store. Most docks are private or owned by a marina. They’re happy to let you use it if you want to come eat at their restaurant, but aren’t as hospitable when you’re looking to head to a store up the road. Most towns have a dinghy dock tucked in some hard to find corner that is the farthest geographical point from the nearest banana. That’s usually where we end up.
When we are eventually allowed to tie up the dinghy and get off, we walk to the closest market. That market is likely either a gas station (it was a 7-11 in Jekyll Island), or a small grocery store that smells like last month’s meat. If there happens to be fruit, we look for the least ripe option, as fruit goes bad quickly on a boat and we don’t know when we’ll be near a store again. Most likely, there is no fresh fruit at all that is worth eating, so we end up in the canned food section hoping for something that doesn’t expire next week. If they have anything in our top 3 (peaches, pears, pineapple), we usually stock up, because even canned fruit can be a novelty. Occasionally we’ll splurge on frozen fruit, but freezer space is a premium (and more expensive than lobster outside of the US).
From there, we load our cans into our foldable wagon and cart them back to the dinghy, where we form a chain to pass our loot down the line into the bottom of the boat. Hopefully the dinghy captain got all the water out. Once back on the boat, the cans are stripped of their labels, marked up with a sharpie, and placed in the semi secret compartment under the galley floor.
Or, we just don’t eat fruit. The latter happens often enough that our kids are losing touch with reality. This conversation actually happened:
Greyson: “Mom, my tummy hurts again”
Meredith: “When did you last have fruit?”
Greyson: “I had pepperoni for lunch”
Meredith: “Pepperoni is not a fruit”
I kid you not.
Let’s be honest, everybody has some food allergies. The crew of Twig is no exception, and these allergies put a little hitch in our giddy up. The most obvious is lactose. Like most adults, milk is out for us, and the rest of the dairy world is shady at best. Our son Hunter has an aversion to gluten which makes the world of grain (think bread, tortillas, pasta, pizza dough) a challenge. Options exist in the GF world…but they usually have eggs, and eggs are persona non grata to Meredith. Add those three together, and we’re lucky when we find a food product that we can all eat…never mind if we actually want to.
We’ve gotten better at accommodating our aversions over time. We have found GF pasta that we all like, and it has a minimum of eggs. Rice and black beans are a staple, usually cooked up on taco tuesday and stretched out as leftovers. Madras lentils are quick, easy, and everybody likes them. As long as they’re not too hungry. When the boys get too hungry, they get hangry and don’t like anything. We haven’t solved for bread yet, so we get both GF and non GF bread. Same with tortillas: we stock both normal and corn.
Cry me a river Greg. Of course they make having one single healthy meal that everybody can (and will) eat difficult, but that’s no different on land. True. The rub is shopping, yet again. Think back to the description of shopping via dinghy. Stocking up on many non produce items is an act of folly at best in the local markets, so we have to do major provisioning stops when we’re in a larger town. In those towns, Costco, Target, and Walmart become our best friends….and an enemy to the wallet.
The post pandemic world, as you know, has made online grocery delivery a snap. In the gaps between major cities, we keep an online shopping cart going and add to it bit by bit as we go. As soon as we have a spot locked in that we know we can take delivery, we check out and await the goodies. What results is a bit like an early Christmas. After one or more dinghy trips to bring the bounty on board, we lay it out on the tables to check out what we bought and figure out where to put it. The result is a well stocked larder full of GF egg free options that will tide us over till the next provisioning run. The problem is that many of these items are highly specific and limit our meal creativity. For example: GF pasta is great warm…but don’t ever eat it cold. It’s nasty. So, pasta salad is out.
Ok, I lied. We get pasta salad, but don’t let Hunter eat it. Jerks.
So, provisioning is a constant game. And keeping three growing kids well fed on a boat is even harder. So, it’s no wonder why we tend to splurge a little when we’re out exploring the sights. At those times we slip comfortably into tourist mode. We will often grab lunch at a cool outdoor patio, or stop in for some ice cream or fudge when checking out the shops in a town.
In the first few months of cruising, we thought nothing of it. Then we realized that we were grabbing a quick ice cream 2-3 times a week, and we needed to reign that in a bit. The big eye opener happened in Savannah, Georgia. After a slow roll out of bed and a quick breakfast, we headed out to explore the city in the late morning. It was hot. Shirt sticking to your back and dripping with sweat kind of hot. At about noon we stopped for a cool down of ice cream at a local joint that we were told was not to miss. The portions were huge, and filled us up. We headed out into the blast furnace and made our way back at around dinner time. It took us a while to realize why everybody was a little hangry, but then we realized that we had ended up having ice cream for lunch.
Not ice cream with lunch. Ice cream for lunch.
Check out some of our other posts!
Well if you eat pepperoni and ice cream you’re hitting 2 of the main food groups, right? Great post again and can relate, to a much lesser extent as yours, with past adventures. I have often wondered about the correlation between economic development and healthy and accessible food (as well as air conditioning). Be well and keep the posts coming, they are so much fun to read.