The Berkeley Bowl: How I Love You, Love You, Love You

About four years ago, I had the blind good fortune to move into an apartment two blocks from the Berkeley Bowl.

At the time, I knew nearly nothing of Berkeley. I had moved there on a whim, having been kicked out of two consecutive San Francisco apartments (It was the height of the Web boom, and owners were selling for the breezy fun of it). After so much spontaneous uprooting, I wanted to settle, and to settle in a place with at least some parking. My reasoning was this:

1. I hate San Francisco.
2. I want to leave.
3. Across that bridge to the right there seem to be some signs of civilization, and the one time I went there I had very good Chinese food.
4. Plus, trees.

I was in a bit of a panic, having been given a few weeks to vacate a place I’d moved into only weeks before. However, after calling various friends in tears and hearing the balming coos of their pity—Of course you can move to Madison, where yes I will assemble an immediate coterie of friends from which yes you will select the love of your life—I scraped together enough clarity to reason with myself. I decided to make the trek over to Berkeley once, for a day, and look for an apartment. If I found one, I would sign a lease. If not, I would flee the area for good.

Isn’t that reasonable?

It was mid-August, and the open-houses were like casting calls, teeming with young kids thrusting their resumes at their scowling elders. Berkeley, of course, is a college town, and the college in the town has a bit of a housing problem. Within this swarm of students and parents, I came sauntering into the properties with nothing but bemusement, like someone with nothing to lose. In fact, I had less than nothing to lose. I had tempted fate; I had challenged her to show me what she had.

Which, promptly, she did. Within an hour, I found a sweet little place with trees and light, if no hardwood floors or laundry. The lease was month-to-month, which suited my skittishness, and the rent was affordable. The landlord—an old German man with a flushed face and watery eyes—scanned my application and, spotting “Employed” instead of “Student,” offered me the place on the spot. I took it.

Later, in an ill-considered attempt at merriment for which he is now notorious, he told me that I was lucky I’d been so pretty.

I knew nothing about the neighborhood. I saw that it wasn’t far from major streets, that houses were draped with bougainvillea, and that no lots seemed to be sprouting rusted cars, except maybe for the lot next to my building, which had a decrepit stove in the back yard, though at this point it might more appropriately have been called a “cat barn.” The neighbors mostly kept to themselves.

Soon enough, I found the Berkeley Bowl, which was across one major road but otherwise accessible, the kind of accessible than induces guilt, since you don’t have to and indeed shouldn’t drive there, and if you go anywhere else you do have to drive, and the place was all vegetables so it was sort of like my mother waving her finger, only she wouldn’t have guilted me into Berkeley Bowl because, at the time, it was dark and shady and in mostly a warehouse and way too grassroots (literally, there were roots of grass there) for her sparkly suburban tastes.

The building had once been a bowling alley, so it was deep toward the rear and filled with bin after bin of produce of every kind. When you entered, what you saw was a carnival of color and shape, an embarrassment of fertility, bins bulbous with the flesh of the earth. But the floor was trashed concrete and there were no windows, so it was like a New Jersey warehouse or a drying out facility, the kind of place you lie low in. Voices hushed, nobody’s talking. It seemed like a Berkeley institution—the prices were giddyingly low—but it wasn’t the kind of institution that preened with pride. It was an underbelly-of-produce kind of place.

There were no aisles. There were winding pathways, and these were narrow and crammed with a derby of carts. Your choices for navigation were either to look down and charge blindly ahead, banging carts out of your way, or to constantly inquire of other customers as to whether they could please move. (Right—no choice at all there, really.) The other option was to park and scurry around on foot, gathering quarry in your arms and dumping it into your cart as you passed back and forth. The problem with this otherwise faultless approach was that, when employed by too many people, the pathways gridlocked and nobody could move. At some point, we all just stood around and looked at each other, arms full, locked in a kind of existential pause. There was a metaphor here, but we were too blitzed to parse it.

At the Berkeley Bowl, everything was raw. There was nothing prepared, nothing processed, nothing boxed. You could not get a quick snack at this place, unless your idea of a quick snack was kolrabi and quinces or silted beet greens. I had a friend who said that the first time she walked into the Berkeley Bowl, she nearly screamed in terror. She had just moved to Berkeley, and she was not sure she wanted to be there. She hated vegetables. She thought, There is nothing for me to eat here. I am going to die. Indeed, Berkeley is not a good place for you if you don’t like vegetables. There is nothing for you to eat there. You will die.

For about a year, my relationship with the Berkeley Bowl was prickly. I went, sometimes, feeling virtuous, knowing I was doing something good. On top of all of its vegetable virtues, it was independently owned, belting out in its crunchiness a song of free-spirited triumph that played in my head all the way to the chain supermarket a few miles down the road.

But I could not, no matter how devoutly it was to be wished, do all of my grocery shopping at the Bowl. Most of what they had was inaccessible to me since it was, after all, uncooked. Once in a while, I ventured into the bulk grains section, in a small room off to the left, a room I’d missed the first few times I’d been. I saw people troweling barley, quinoa, and amaranth into bags, lining up to get them weighed. These people knew something I didn’t. They knew how to take items that looked like sand and cover them with items that had been grown in sand and shake a little of the items that looked like black water over the whole thing, to delicious effect. I wanted to eat at their houses, but I worked at home and didn’t get out much, and so far nobody had invited me.

So for the first year, I went there on and off, for a quick cucumber or a bag of carrots, things that could be sliced and dropped into a bowl and called a salad. Once in a great while, I tried a recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, a stir-fry or casserole that would occasion the purchase of something that it turned out came in a fresh version, like ginger (there it was! as if it had known I was coming!) or black beans. But mostly, I went to the chain.

And then: the revolution.

In a lot a block away, equidistant from my apartment, a chain-link fence went up, and next to it a sign: Future Home of the Berkeley Bowl. They were moving and their move, so went the neighborhood scuttlebutt, would be accompanied by a proliferation of grocery products and a shift toward a slightly more “mainstream” grocery store. My heart fluttered. Dared I dream? I’d learned the hard way than anything carrying the promise of “all my problems solved at once” tended to disappoint, so I tried not to hold my breath.

I watched it go up. It looked large, too large for just vegetables. It looked like maybe they would have things that came in boxes and here and there a loaf of bread. If you went up to the chain link fence and pressed your nose against it, you could speculate as to whether the long, stainless steel counter spanning much of the right side of the store was going to front the kitchen facilities and whether these same kitchen facilities would produce prepared food—food that came already cooked and was scooped from bowls into plastic tubs per pound. Glory to God in the highest.

Months later, the new Bowl opened to great fanfare—and to lines extending to the back of the store. During the opening weekend, I walked through the gleaming front doors, took in the teeming hordes, and turned around for home. Three times. Eventually, I realized that the optimal time to cruise the new Bowl would be Tuesday morning. That, after all, is the time of the week when the most Americans are staying exactly where they belong, which we know because the least number of them are in airplanes.

What was I doing Tuesday morning? What do you think? I’m a freelance writer.

I went. It was, as promised, a palace of produce. An entire wing of the store, possibly encompassing more square footage than the entire previous store, had been dedicated to the display of this produce, and it was gleaming and beautiful. Tub after tub of apples, pears, oranges, grapefruit, lemons, limes, tomatoes, avocadoes, mushrooms, zucchini, squash, eggplant, potatoes, melons, kiwis, star fruit, chard, fennel, parsnips, asparagus, leeks, and broccoli rabe. Bin after bin of carrots, cukes, peppers, chilis, watercress, berries, stone fruits, heirlooms, Asian pears, tangelos, pluots, plaintains, yams, scallions, Rainier cherries and baby dinosaur kale. There was all of this in every vicissitude—organic, pesticide-free, and poisoned. Locally farmed, distantly farmed, internationally farmed, grown in somebody’s cellar. It terms of fertility it was a gilded lily, like the hugely pregnant woman who wears a dress patterned with melons.

But there was so much more. There was a fish counter, and a butcher, and a dairy section. There were aisles and aisles of food that came in cans and boxes, including a whole row of personal hygiene products herbal in nature. There were freezers with ice cream (and Soy Dream!) and tater tots (and organic eda mame!) and two rows of kiosks with bread from local bakeries. There were tortilla chips and salsa of every stripe and a refrigerator with cold bottled drinks and a station for fresh soup and rolls. And, to the right, exactly where we had expected them, there were no fewer than four counters of prepared foods—a deli, a burrito bar, a sushi bar, and a home cookin’ section replete with salads in bowls ripe for parceling in plastic tubs.

Hosanna!

Immediately, I became a regular. What need had I for any other grocery source? Exactly none.

Quickly, several things became clear. The first was that I would have to keep going on Tuesday mornings, or at least on weekday mornings excluding Monday and Friday, the former of which was jammed with tapped-out-of-food-over-the-weekenders and the latter of which buzzed with need-food-for-the-weekenders. Still, even going on a mid-week morning was no guarantee of clear aisles, because Berkeley is not a normal place where people spend their days at the office. (Recently, a friend who is writing and producing a series for Canadian television asked me why is it that people in Berkeley are so happy. It’s because nobody has a job.)

On the other hand, if I made several short trips, each with twelve items or fewer, I could go at almost any time. This quickly evolved into okay but no matter how windswept those aisles get I’m not allowed to go more than twice a week, because there was a very cute checker who liked to flirt and I maybe was going to get myself in trouble.

I need to back up a little here.

There was a time in my life, and it was this time that I’m talking about, when various events conspired to show me that romantically, things could use a little overhauling. Of course, as soon as I realized that this was the case, I met someone I liked. A short, whirlwind mutual infatuation convinced me still more that the overhaul was necessary, so I told him that I would have to disappear for maybe like a year. He was very agreeable. He was, in fact, agonizingly agreeable. So we made a rule, no contact, and that was ostensibly that, except that he lived on the other side of the Bowl and shopped there regularly.

So it’s January, it’s February, it’s March, and every time I go to the Bowl I’m thinking Will I see him so I try to look cute, I try to wear something memorable, I try especially to need groceries right after my hair’s been bleached so I’m light-bulb blonde. And he’s never there, but the checkers are awfully cute, especially one that sort of looks like him, and they’re there. They’re always there. They start to know me and give me warm smiles. One of them calls me Hello Kitty, after my wallet. She says, “It’s Hello Kitty!” every time I sidle up to her line. Another one asks me, very sincerely, how my day is, as though she very much wants to know, and then, again as if she very much wants to know, she follows through with a meaningful response to whatever I’ve said. This is actually sort of creepy.

It’s hard to find a checker who is not cute at the Berkeley Bowl, and if you were, say, on a Romantic Year Off and banned from dating, you might elect to take in the love at a general level. I could have done that. There were days, you know, when I did that. But at some point I managed to set my sights on one checker in particular, and to try without fully admitting that I was trying to get into his line.

An amazing thing happened. Every time I would get into his line, his shift would end just as I was nudging towards the conveyor belt with the tip of my cart. Some other enterprising checker would saunter down the lane, drawer in hand, and my crush would key out and the new person would key in. It happened once, it happened twice, it happened thrice. I could hardly believe it, so I kept counting. Four, five, six. I began to purposefully get into his line, no longer to flirt but merely to see whether he would be replaced. Seven. Finally, I invited a witness, and it happened again.

Naturally, I held God responsible. God knew that it was my Romantic Year Off. God knew that I was not supposed to be dating or even flirting, and every time I tried to get a little hit at the Berkeley Bowl, God, for whom I refuse to use a gendered pronoun and so goes always by God, guided the hand of the Berkeley Bowl manager to replace my checker with another. God was gentle and loving and excruciatingly patient. God would not bend to my will no matter how many times I bucked up against God’s. Melissa, Sweetheart, God had said eight times and would willingly say again, no checker for you.

Predictably, these behind-the-scenes machinations ended in concert with my Year of Abstinence. As I eased out of the Fallow Year and into dating the man I’d met before, I started choosing check-out lines based merely on length. Once in a while, I’d land in my crush’s lane, and I’d sail through unimpeded. Of course, this gave me enough time with him to realize that we actually had very little in common, or so it seemed from his failure to laugh at my hilarious jokes.

For a healthy chunk of time now, I’ve been dating the same man, the one who, miraculously (this is also God) spanned both Januaries surrounding the Year Off. So now when I go into the Bowl, I am neither looking for him (though of course I still primp) nor trying to get into a certain checker’s line. And in this setting, all kinds of relationships have flourished. I’m on a first-name, how-was-your-weekend basis with the guy behind the prepared foods counter (he met my mother before my boyfriend did). I dig the Hello Kitty lady. I share sympathetic, yes-life-is-tiring smiles with the curly-haired guy in the low-slung pants. The dude behind the fish counter likes my silver necklace. And the sushi chef knows I like the spicy roll.

This, I believe, is community.

And indeed, the Berkeley Bowl is a pillar of our community, it is one of the things that holds us up and binds us together. If you live in Berkeley, you know it, and you probably love it, though less so if you have to drive there, because parking is a sick and twisted game. I have run into countless people I know there, including someone I hadn’t seen since high school (twelve years earlier and on the East Coast), someone I was once in a writing group with and was avoiding, my next door neighbor, and yes, my once and future boyfriend. I did run into him once during the Year of Romantic Nothingness, at the end of March, the day before I left for a trip to Mexico. He was standing in front of the bananas and my heart shot straight up into my throat. At first I fled, sequestering myself in Prepared Foods, where I had friends and where he, a vegan who loves to cook, would never go. But then I screwed my courage to the sticking place and returned to Produce. We chatted briefly, hugged, wished privately (we learned later) that we could fall into each other’s arms but instead parted ways and left it to Fate, or to God—whichever one is nicer.

In the meantime, I used my year well. I used it, in fact, to learn to cook. I bought things in Produce and Bulk Grains and I chopped them, I sautéed them, I stir-fried them, I steamed them, I roasted them. I discovered a very important thing about raw foods, which is that no matter what they are, there are only so many ways to deal with them. Basically, you heat them up. You can do this on top of the stove or inside the oven or in the toaster, once in a while. You can do it with water or with oil. You can do it slowly on a low heat or quickly on a high heat. Pretty much any raw food, when treated in one of these ways, will become something edible—and even moreso if you add sea salt or Nutella.

Finally, if you try something and mess it up, nothing bad happens. Well, unless you make yourself eat it. I did that once, and here’s my advice: Don’t.

I love the Berkeley Bowl. I cannot, after four years as a patron, imagine shopping for groceries anywhere else. And if, God-willing, it should stay in business for the duration, which by its endless checkout lines it shows all signs of doing, I may have to live in this apartment forever.