Notes on the Australian Grocery; Haves and Have-Nots

First of all, I was pretty surprised to see that there was an IGA in Armidale.  And then in Bellingen.  And another in Coffs Harbour.  For some reason I don't even think of IGA as a supermarket chain, let alone an international one.  It'll always just be the little IGA grocery store on the highway to me.  I'd be just as surprised if there was a Ben Franklin or a Bargain Nook in Uralla.

That said, the biggest grocery in Armidale is Woolworths, aka Wooly's. (Woolies?)  I was trying to remember if any of the supermarket chains in the US get their names abbreviated, but I can't think of any.  I feel like it's kind of like Meijer, only all the non-supermarket stuff is separated out into another store called Big W.

Vegemite.  Okay, so everyone knows Australia has vegemite, right?  But what I didn't quite realize was the array of choices and selection within the category.  Genus and species.  Would you like to try vegemite or mighty-mite? Cheesybite, aussie-mite or ozimite?  And I don't even know what marmite is.  Probably for now we'll just stick to American-style peanut butter... which was shipped from America.  For some reason it's cheaper than the stuff that was made in Australia.

The relationship Australia has with England is a little confusing to me, but one thing they have in common for sure is the biscuits.  Bikkies are generally separated into three categories: plain, savoury, or sweet.  I don't know when exactly a biscuit becomes a crisp or a cookie (because they have those too).  You could probably make a Venn diagram to explain it.

Kaffir lime leaves, fresh, dried, canned... you name it, they got it.  I guess that's a nice thing about being so close to Southeast Asia.  Somewhat related is the large selection of jasmine rice.  It has the largest presence in the store between brands, types, and packaging sizes.  Whereas brown rice you can only buy either regular, in 1kg or 2kg packages, or in the organic section.

Dairy Milk.  This is what they call milk chocolate here.  And they definitely like their chocolate sweetened.  I was a little concerned at first that there was such an overwhelming presence of Dairy Milk that I wondered if they even had dark chocolate in this country.  (They do, so we can stay awhile.) (Not that we've bought any; the only chocolate we've bought so far were Dairy Milk easter eggs on sale for $2/kg... a little hard to pass up.)

And of course... you can probably find dragonfruit and passion fruit and jackfruit and all sorts of tropical things like that in the States, but I didn't see much of it in the Midwest so it's kind of a surprise to see it here.

And now a couple have-nots.

Black beans.  The supermarket doesn't have them and even the healthy bulk-foods store doesn't have them.  Whatever shall we do without our frijoles negros?!  There is also only one kind of plain corn chips, so maybe people just eat their nachos with doritos here.

(Finally found the) lemon juice.  I feel this deserves a mention here on my little list because of the difficulty it took to find it.  On multiple shopping trips I would peruse the aisles (especially the fruit juice and beverage areas) to no avail.  And when we did find it, it was completely by accident that Reid was looking up in its general direction and the bright yellow bottle was hard to miss.  Answer: next to the barbeque sauce.  Of course.  duh.

Otherwise it's just like America only you have to wheel your shopping cart on the left side of the aisle.  (And raisins are sultanas and peppers are capsicums.)