Way Safe.

My mom had such high hopes for her fondue set. In the end, she went to bed upset and I went to bed hungry. My Barbies put the tiny forks to good use, though. And, basically, I’ve been marked safe from Fondue Night since 1976. Way safe.

Alison Martino recently posted this image of Safeway’s advertising logo from 1963. The iconic “S” mosaic was created by Alfonso Pardiñas (1924-1975), a renowned Mexican-American mosaic artist and founder of Byzantine Mosaics in San Francisco. Introduced in the 1960s and widely used through the 1970s, they adorned the facades of hundreds of Safeway stores across the United States and Canada.

 The mosaics are a fond memory from my childhood. Every Saturday, I’d tag along with my mom to the beauty shop, where she got her hair teased up for church the next morning. Afterward, we’d head to the grocery store. In 1979, her weekly allowance was about $40, and her hair appointment cost $5 to $7. She stretched the remaining $30 or so into breakfast, lunch, and dinner for an entire week.

Poor People Food

Growing up, we ate a lot of spaghetti, dumplings, pork chops, instant mashed potatoes, chili, and Rice-A-Roni. Also, dreaded hamburger patties I drenched in ketchup. It was classic poor-people food, both filling and cheap.

So when my mom splurged on a fondue set and declared 1976 the year of Fondue Night, it was a genuine shock to the system. The bubbling pot of cheese and those tiny little forks made me feel like a contestant on a game show called Middle-Class Living. It was strange and heartbreaking.

Salting Slices and Sunshine On A Stick

My mom bought green grapes exactly twice during my childhood. It was such a momentous occasion that I remember the price both times: once at 29 cents a pound, and once at 49. That’s how rare they were. Luxuries measured down to the penny.

I have no memory of apples, oranges, or strawberries ever showing up in our kitchen. Occasionally, there were frozen blueberries or a wedge of cantaloupe. In summer, depending on where we lived, we’d pick wild blackberries along the roadside.

My dad usually bought a watermelon for the Fourth of July, salting the slices, which I still do to this day. And once a woman at church gave a presentation on Hawaii during Missionary Night. She passed around a platter of fresh pineapple, which was better than Timer and all my dreams of Sunshine On A Stick.

Eat Your Fruits and Vegetables

When I was 19, I got a job at a grocery store and that’s how I learned the name of every vegetable under the sun. I started experimenting in the kitchen, cooking things I’d never seen growing up: rhubarb, artichokes, jicama, plantains. None of these were in my vocabulary until I was nearly 20.

Today, most of the old Safeway mosaics have been lost to time or covered over during renovations. But spotting one still stirs memories in me of Brach’s candy displays, S&H Green Stamps, and the quiet rituals of grocery shopping in the 1970s. They’re visual time capsules from a bygone era, rich in retro-cultural appeal for Gen Xers like me. More than that, they remind me of those Saturday so long ago, walking beside the shopping cart, looping my hand through the strap of my mom’s purse — holding on to her, and to the hope that one day we might have enough money for something good to eat.