America: Peanut Butter and Jerkey

When I travel I LOVE to go to grocery stores. In India I saw corn flakes with real mango! In a Sainsbury's near Hull, the place where they had butter and shortening was marked "fats."

I've started trying to look at my own grocery store outings as a foreigner might.

I was in a filling-station convenience store one day and it seemed to me that everything was internationally normal and boring, until I came to the jerkey. I wouldn't have thought much about jerkey if Ollie Daniel hadn't said that when he was in the RAF they went to an American airbase for some training or something, and went to the PX and got some American things to try, like jerkey.

Candid jerkey section in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2013:

If anyone wants to examine that second photo in more detail, click here, and then click the image that loads. It will be too gross for vegetarians and Hindus. Might be too gross for most people. That's a lot in one place.

If you like looking at image details, you might really like Shorpy: http://www.shorpy.com/image (Nearly every file is huge, and you can drive around the little details; much nicer than my photo, only not jerkey from 2013.)