Sgt/Cpl. Blondie stumbled across evidence of this, at a local chain grocery—the one I always call the Humongous Big-Ass Grocery. It is truly one of the glories of living in Texas, a local chain which has run practically every other big grocery chain out of town with a combination of unparalleled customer service, quite good prices on their house brands, and an unimaginable variety of fine grocery items for the discriminating foodie. I firmly believe that the Iron Curtain would have slipped off its’ rod and collapsed even sooner if selected members of the Politburo could have been given guided tours of the average HEB store… the sheer lavish glories of American grocery stores are legend, and HEB does that all one or two steps better. They pay really close attention to their local market. I have a theory that you can calculate the average per capita income in a neighborhood (before taxes) by counting up how many varieties of olive oil are on the shelves at the local HEB… so many varieties X so many $ thousands in income, and there you have it. I haven’t worked out the exact figures yet (I’m only an English major, you know!!!!), but the greater the variety of olio d’ olive, the higher the income. The HEB nearest Lackland AFB, I’ll have you know, had only 2, and one of them was that nasty yellow Pompeii brand drek, which was all that was on the major grocery markets for decades, before anyone acquired any taste in the matter at all.

Olive oil— it’s a small thing, but something I noticed, because of being in Greece, where it was the font of all civilization (according to legend), and then in Spain where Alcampo, the Spanish equivalent to Walmart, with every imaginable item under one roof, and at next to wholesale prices, offered an entire aisle of olive oil, of every quantity and quality.
I came home from Spain with six 1.5 liter bottles of a good and faintly greenish brand of the stuff, which lasted me for barely a year.
That’s the trouble with being stationed overseas a lot; eventually you sample the local stuff- something that is a local taste, and hardly ever exported, and when you come home, you are bereft… sometimes. A year or so after I came home from Japan, my friend Marsh (She of the marvelous engine-mount challenged car) were overjoyed to discover a small Japanese-American eatery that offered… Katsudon!

Katsudon; a dish all the more luscious because it is very good, and filling and cheap, and most marvelous of all— available everywhere. (And when you said it, the waiter/waitress understood it!) It was the hamburger, or the meatloaf of Japan, a bowl of rice topped with a breaded and friend pork cutlet, and a savory glob of poached egg and onion, all the juices seeping down to flavor the rice with sweet liquor. You could go— or so said the Japanese lady who taught the “Intro to Japan 1A— into any casual eatery in Japan, and ask for “katsudon” and get some variant of it. There is of late in one of my cooking magazines, a recipe for such, which shows how adventurous the foodie population may have become— two decades ago, practically no one who hadn’t done a tour in Japan had ever heard of it at all. People who have served overseas have heaps of examples— lovely and particularly local foods which they became addicted to, and could never find again, or if they could, at great expense, once they came “home”.

Which gets me back, however circuitously to HEB, and food items from Japan. Blondie found an import item at a local HEB store, and fell on it joyfully; a particular brand of Japanese soda. It came in very distinctive blue-green glass bottles, sealed with a blue-green glass marble in the neck of it. A bulge in the neck, and a pinch molded into the glass on one side kept the bottle from rolling back into the top opening if you drank it holding the bottle in a certain way. Vendors kept a particular punch at their stand, to open it by pushing the marble back into the neck— where it had otherwise made a tight seal against force of carbonation. The soda was otherwise fairly indistinguishable from ginger ale, or some other clear, mildly sweet and carbonated drink… but still. Neither of us expected to see it on the market here, but whattaya know. Here it is.

This pic of me (center) and two other girls from the barracks (Sorry, I can’t recall their names!) was taken during a local festival, about 1977, when all the traffic on Misawa’s main street was cut off, and it was decorated with lanterns and banners, and stalls. All of us have a bottle of this particular soda in hand.