Where Do I Get My Food?

I have three sources: our smallish store on Zamami, ordering from Naha, and going to Naha. I also grow or make a significant portion of my food.

For most things, I order them from a Naha store called the Co-op. I think this is more a name than a store model that resembles what we Westerners know as cooperatives. It's a real supermarket in Naha that distributes a weekly catalog to people living on the islands. Every Thursday I go online and submit my item numbers and quantities, get the order confirmation, then get that food the next Thursday. A generous woman I work with at the Board of Education picks up the food from the ferry at noon and brings it back to the BoE, where I get it after school.

[the catalog is about 30 pages long]

The Co-op prices are usually in between what I would pay at Zamami's store and Naha, plus I pay a 2% delivery charge (but that sneaky Co-op charges more in the catalog than in their store for the same products!). For all items that are similarly priced, I buy from the Zamami store to support them. There are a select few items that I buy in Naha when I'm there (olive oil, honey, tea).

[$88 worth of groceries]

I placed my order two weeks ago and was surprised last week when I went to get the food but nothing was there. Apparently the order didn't go through. But yesterday, I found out it did go through. After the deadline. Somehow I just missed it. Which meant that this past week I had two orders in - one intentional and one unintentional. So all those order numbers from the previous week's late order bought me $44 worth of surprise groceries. I ended up with tons of tomatoes, tiny orders of onions, 5 bags of tempura batter (instead of flour), fancy little cheeses, individual yogurt (I would never buy this because of all the packaging), mayonnaise, and two refrigerated items that I couldn't identify. I gave them away. It all made for a good laugh.

One interesting note is that when I enter in my numbers there is a confirmation screen where I can see what I have ordered, but most things are written in kanji I don't know. So if I could read kanji I could've prevented this, but... this is the joy of living in a foreign country!