I have been doing almost all my grocery shopping online for over a decade. Then it was all about my back, but then my hips got replaced and I could stand up again – but I didn’t see the point. And then came corona and although I try here and there to get comfortable in a supermarket, I really don’t enjoy it. But my last order with Shufersal was a disaster. They changed the site to make the pictures bigger but I couldn’t find anything, it was so complicated, and a lot of things were missing. So with my fear of another lockdown soon, and going into the sabbath missing … something … I needed to go shopping. But Ezi isn’t safe yet, and Friday is a morning of frantic food shopping because everyone is hysterical about closed shops, so we decided to go late – and we went to where it is always open but at a time when most people are getting ready to nap for the evening – 4 o’clock on Friday afternoon. Tiv-Taam.

I had been there before – about 18 months ago – and I have spent so many years in groceries that I know blindfolded where everything is – so ultimately we spent less time there than I usually spend online – but it’s hard for me to compare prices and quality, and I wound up paying much more than usual. Tiv Taam is a Russian-oriented chain and they go for exotic imported stuff – some of which I really like – like Kfir and Russian smoked salmon. But I won’t be back there for a long time. As a food hoarder, this is a big problem.

Why am I a food hoarder? 1. I’m still used to having 13 people for lunch every Saturday or Friday night. 2. I grew up in the kind of weather where you could easily be stuck home for weeks because of the snow. 3. Holocaust mentality. We had cold cellars and extra freezers and a terrible fear of not enough. My mother worried for years that I was too thin – and didn’t enjoy eating. The fear was that I would splay my legs out and collapse like Sholom Aleichem’s horse. (The one he put on a diet getting used to eating less and less and he almost got it down to nothing, until the horse died.