One of the most annoying things about living here has been the quality of the alleged food in grocery stores. I lived in the Midwest and South before coming here, and the first time I hit a Safeway in Washington, I was shocked: All of the food looked like it had been shaped out of cardboard and tasted about the same. And the meat…well, as a boy who grew up in cow country, I thought the meat was an insult to the animals from whence it allegedly came.

This particularly comes up every time I throw a big barbecue like the one I’m having in about a week, where 30 people will show up. For example, I’ve found no reliable source for brisket here — one of my barbecue staples. You can pay $5 per pound for brisket flats (not whole briskets) at Shopper’s Food Warehouse and they may or may not be trimmed to within an inch of their lives; they’re really designed for making corned beef from scratch, not for smoking up Texas style. And other barbecue meats are either equally awful and/or equally overpriced.

But lately, really nice Hispanic supermarkets (not the old, kind of grungy ones that popped up in the past) have been opening in my area. I went to one today a few miles from my house…and sure enough, there were beautiful whole briskets at $2 per pound, and pork shoulders at $1 per pound, and the best-looking fish and shrimp I’ve ever seen in groceries around here (you should have seen the red snapper…a thing of beauty). And I realized that if you get away from industrial grocery chains, you might get away from industrial groceries. Sure, you might have trouble conversing with the checkout crew, but the 11.5-pound hunk o’ meat I walked out of the store with (I’ll have to put that on at midnight for a 6 p.m. dinner, by the way) made it all worthwhile.