Damin is now visiting Green.

He knows that Green has online grocery shopping where they deliver your order, but he actually wants to be in person. Both so he can actually use all of his senses on the products – smell and touch cannot be conveyed by electronics – but also so that he can tell his drones how to act and buy what he needs and be discerning so that he doesn't have to go grocery shopping himself.

He's staying in a big city, and is willing to travel to go to a big grocery store with lots of options, especially given that he's not going to be carrying any of the groceries: the three drones he's bringing will. The last one has been left behind to house-sit.

What does the grocery store look like from the outside?

The biggest grocery store in this city is still only one story high, though it has apartments on top. It's big, though. There's an automat and a custom breadbowls mini-restaurant, near the entrance on the left; to the right of the big doors there's a corner of the store set aside for things that are particularly likely to be run out of and fetched on an emergency basis by someone who wants only one thing, like eggs or onions or party fruit platters. The concrete walk in front of the store is dyed, wobbly stripes of red and pink and grey, and there are potted red-leafed maple trees and planters full of begonias gently calming the traffic. The store itself is an instance of the chain "Harvest Joy", and logos to this effect may be seen in the windows.

An automat!! He supposes that that would indeed be a thing that you would do if you didn't have drones and the cost of labor was high. Damin hasn't like, ever seen an automat before, that was actually a Restaurant That Makes Money Off Of Selling Food and not a place whose draw was the gimmick of "look, no drones!". If he were doing the same thing in Zmavlimu'e he'd just get six drones and have them do an 8-8-8 or 8-8-7 shift rotation (the one hour closed so that the place can be deep cleaned), and this would be cheaper than the amortized cost of the machines and their maintenance costs. But he couldn't imagine hiring six contractors to do that!! It would be so expensive and he'd have to do so much negotiation.

Also it wouldn't make very much money because only 2% of the Zmavlimu'ean population cares about the taste of their food. For all that Zmavlipre like tasty food, Zmavlimu'e actually has fewer restaurants per capita (if you include drones) compared to other medianworlds for that reason. And because all of them have cook staffs so they eat out less. 

He also wants to see the breadbowls restaurant because it's a Foreign Food Place and he wonders how Green breadbowls would differ, but he came here to do grocery shopping and he should stop being distracted. He did eat before coming here, that being the virtuous thing to do to avoid impulse buys.

The emergency buy corner is very interesting. Is it labeled so, or does it just Exist and you're supposed to Already Know Its Purpose? Does it have its own separate counter? Is the counter staffed or is it like the automat and has some sort of self or automated checkout type deal? What things do Greens commonly run out of and have to buy quickly?

Aside from the corner, how is the store laid out? In Zmavlimu'e, about half of all grocery stores have a Keeper section and a drone section, where the Keeper section is all decorated with things presented all nicely and you can see a variety of products all at once, and the drone section has the same products but with plain packaging, and is also the main warehouse where most of the stock is stored. Drones do not need to have things be presented nicely to them, and also come to grocery stores with a specific list of things to buy, unlike Keepers who might browse and think of what to buy on the spot. Is it the same situation here?

The walk to the store is lovely and he does like the warm color aesthetic they've gone with. He's kind of sad that he's wearing his bright blue and gold getup that's his favorite, because the blue and red are clashing. Oh well.

When he enters the store, does anyone greet him? Do they have store employees attending to customers? He's not expecting it though, because of the dronelessness thing and all.

The emergency buy corner is not named but it has suggestive copy on the posters above the shelves - "Oh no, I just realized, we're out of... [EGGS/ONIONS/SALSA/CREAM]" and "Wow, the [FRUIT/NUTS/CHEESE/CANDY] is really going fast this time..."

There are maps of the store inlaid into the floor at about half the intersections. It does not, of course, have a Keeper and a drone section. It has a frozen section, a fridge section, a bulk section, a produce section, a bakery section, and a packaged section. All of those are likewise subdivided; for example, ice cream has its own zone in the frozen region of the store. Some sections - from here he can see the ice cream - are arranged in an almost chartlike way, in this case by brand and flavor. The brands don't have identical flavors, of course, and some judgment has been applied to determine that Praline Caramel Ribbon is more like Chocolate Toffee than like Lemon Cake, but if you were hoping to find the closest flavor to Lemon Cake in a brand that doesn't have it you would be offered Summer Berry or Banana Grape Cookie Crumble, whereas looking at the Chocolate Toffee end of things will get you things more like Peanut Coconut and Quadruple Fudge Avalanche.

The Greens do seem to care about presentation some - there's a very pretty mountain of hard cheeses over there, arranged more for show than for chart-like browsing.

No one greets him. There are Greens operating a couple of cash registers, and another couple managing the technical difficulties for a long bank of self-checkouts. There's two on duty at the bread bowl place, and beyond the mountain of cheese there is a Customer Service desk with an employee at it. There are some people doing picking for delivery groceries and matching the barcodes on their orders to the slips presented to them by the dogs and horses coming through the cart-through line, which isn't strictly speaking inside the store, just accessed through another set of doors.

There is so much in this grocery store! The bakery and the packaged section he would have expected to be separate shops in Zmavlimu'e. It's common for them to be near the grocery, but not actually in it. The ice cream section he also would have expected to be a separate shop.

The inlaying of the store map on the floor is very clever and he likes it. Of course people must navigate on their own, not having any drone attendants who have memorized the store layout.

Damin does not see the chartlike sorting by brand and flavor to be unusual and expects it. How Greens sort by flavor is fascinating and he should tell Marin about it...he'd probably want to do a study. He asks himself whether he wants ice cream. Maybe. He thinks he wants hot desserts right now. Though the ice cream doesn't have to be eaten immediately – he can just put it in the fridge and leave it there until he actually feels like eating it...he is going to succumb to the impulse to impulse buy.

He wants fruity ice cream that isn't overly sweet. Do they have that? Summer Berry looks interesting – what berries are in it? Are there other ones? He's thinking he wants a fruit that's lighter and with a 'fresher' taste than berries, something like muskmelon or wintermelon or cucumber or the like. Or something with a floral taste, like rose or chrysanthemum. Do they have samples? His intuition is saying no, because they're prepackaged, even though in Zmavlimu'e grocers would have tasters available even for prepackaged stuff. 

What is the packaging like on the ice cream? What stuff is on it? What are the food safety certifications in Green – does the packaging display its certifications on the cover? Or other certifications aside from food safety. He's heard that a significant number of Greens have atopic reactions to certain foods and must avoid them – do the foods display certification about having very low concentrations of this or that ingredient? Or maybe that they're vegetarian: there's now vegetarian certification in Zmavlimu'e too that products can apply for even though vegetarianism is very niche.

Cheese! The Cheese Mountain is endearing and he finds it cute. It's definitely the sort of thing you would see in the Keeper section of a Zmavlimu'ean grocery.

Self-checkout! He has half a mind to try out the self-checkout but he wouldn't have any intuition or experience in using it and it would be mortifying to hold up the line unnecessarily because he's a clueless foreigner...though they do have two employees there to oversee and troubleshoot so clearly they're already accounting for that. He'll get to that when he gets to it.

What are the dogs and horses doing here. Oh – they're trained delivery dogs and horses? Fascinating! He supposes that if you are droneless then that would be a very logical thing to do.

They don't have samples of the ice cream, though there are samples of things that will sit at room temperature better, like cheese and fruit.

Summer Berry has blueberry and strawberry and seedless raspberry in it. If he is willing to look at lots and lots of ice cream flavors he eventually can find hibiscus watermelon, rose apple, and cantaloupe sorbet. Some of the ice cream comes in screw-top cylinders, some of it comes in single-serve dishes meant to be eaten out of directly (including the rose apple), but most of it, including the hibiscus watermelon and the cantaloupe sorbet, comes in round tapered coated cardboard that looks like it'd nest nicely when empty and be pretty easy to scoop out of. Each ice cream brand has a distinct look-and-feel of text and color, this one in transparent plastic with severe calligraphy using the ice cream itself as a background, that one in swoopy block letters with whimsical footnotes. They all certify that they are consumer-safe and contain their listed ingredients to within the standard tolerances according to the National Board of Comestibles. Some of them additionally certify that they source all their ingredients from suppliers approved by the Animal Welfare Ratchet Society, or that they are Spirit Friendly, or that they are approved by Responsible Global Citizenry International; some of them have the number of ingredients advertised in a standard sort of box on the side, if the number is below 6 or so. All of them have ingredients, usually in a box on the top of the container but some on the bottom. None of them specify that they are vegetarian apart from listing what is in them.

He is indeed willing – he doesn't actually have much planned today because he wanted to be immersed in Foreign Grocery.

All of it has fancy packaging! If they don't have a Keeper and drone section separation then that makes sense. Usually what happens is that the product is dressed up when in the Keeper section and has plain packaging in the drone section, and this is fine because you almost never just serve the thing straight up – you present it nicely on your fine dinnerware before serving. The single serve dishes are so strange and fascinating to him and he gets the rose apple one partly for this reason.

What carrying aids are available? Zmavlimu'e has baskets but rarely carts. Does Green do something else?

He will trust the National Board of Comestibles's certification. The...number of ingredients being advertised is...so strange???? Why is having fewer ingredients good. You should put as many ingredients as is necessary to make the thing you wanted to make. What if the recipe demanded many ingredients? He's going to ask his Green contacts about that some other time.

What other things are available in the frozen section? He doesn't expect to find frozen dronemeal – processed dronemeal is usually a dry powder rather than frozen ingredients – but probably there are frozen meals or something? That is just Not A Thing in Zmavlimu'e but if he's modeling things correctly it seems like the sort of thing that would fit. If there is one he thinks he'll buy one to taste it.

There are frozen meals! Many of them are just entrées, either microwaveable or bakeable entire in one tray (casseroles, stews), or possible to individually remove and cook (sasuages, dumplings); one brand has a whole bunch of pick-and-mix small-plates that are all supposed to microwave for the same amount of time, so if you want three servings of sweet potatoes and a thing of creamed corn and a thing of cheesy chicken for dinner you could get that and put them all in at once.

He wants to try one to see how it would taste. There basically aren't frozen meals in Zmavlimu'e, and he's curious as to how one would taste. He'll take a box of dumplings and put it in the pullbasket, which is being managed by Rend, his valet.

The small-plates thing is so interesting too! He supposes that labor saving would be way way more important in a droneless world, so it would make sense to have that.

What other things do they have in the frozen or refrigerated section? He also expects the dairy products to be stored here, but he wants to wander a bit before getting the staples.

There are frozen ingredients - fruits, vegetables, meat, fish - as well as pastry and juice concentrate and other sundries. He and his drones are actually blocking the way for someone who is gesturing that she wants the frozen garlic paste. In the fridge area there are, yes, dairy products! Milk and cream and butter and soft cheese. There are also pickled things, and fresh juice, and non-dried noodles, and a display of single-serve prepared foods that can be eaten cold immediately - sandwiches and wraps and salad-type things and some cold noodle dishes and some cold soups and some chip-and-dip or cracker-and-cheese type miniature meal kits.

Oops. He will order his drones to rearrange into a more compact formation. 

Zmavlipre tend not to buy frozen ingredients so much anymore. Back then, when artificial refrigeration was first invented, first using ice and then using machines, freezing food was all the rage, since it preserved food while changing its taste much less than with other preservation techniques. And also because they had worse transportation technology, so many foods had to be preserved somehow so as to be in a state still edible after shipping. Now those problems are fixed, so most things are merely refrigerated, rather than frozen. This changes the taste of the food much less.

He's curious as to why there would be such an abundance of frozen products in this Green grocery. It could be that it's just an outlier, but maybe it's like, an arbitrage thing? Drones will be fed what is cheap and nutritionally complete, and Keepers are a small enough percentage of the population that demand for perishables is easily satisfied by local supply. But if everyone is a person and everyone has food preferences, then, say, if everyone decides that they want meat now, then that demand has to be supplied. Frozen food can be transported for farther and keeps for longer, so it would provide a buffer against shocks. He should probably ask a Green acquaintance about this rather than pointlessly speculate.

He'll try to see whether there's fresh meat and fruit and vegetables available but if there aren't then he will settle for frozen ones.

Zmavlimu'ean cuisine has like, no cold savory food – it remains very niche. Room temperature savory food yes, but no cold, because cold savory food makes people think that the food is either stale or raw, which are both undesirable things for food to be, and this judgment persists even if the food has been assessed safe. Dessert will be accepted at all three temperatures, though.

Cold soup! Is it dessert soup, or savory soup? He'll be very interested if it's dessert, and not if it's savory.

He will get a bunch of milk – several liters of it. Is the milk pasteurized? He's assuming so but he does want to make sure. He has cows at his ranch, so when he wants milk he just gets milk from the cows with no processing, but he definitely pasteurizes it if he's selling it, unless he has some sort of arrangement or contract with someone that they want raw milk.

He will also get a bunch of things of cream and a bunch of things of butter. Hooray dairy products. Actually he should look up how Green ranching works. It's definitely the thing that ought to be different if you don't have drone labor available.

He will also get a few of the soft cheeses that seem interesting, in the smallest containers to try, in case he doesn't like them.

He is not sure what 'pickles' are and is not going to take any.

Is coconut cream in the fridge section? If it isn't then he'll keep an eye out as he moves around the store, but if there aren't any packs of it he'll look for whole coconuts instead and then have the drones process that into cream later.

It's not dessert soup, it's potatoes and leeks. Most of the milk is pasteurized except some which is branded as being better for making cheese.

Coconut cream is not in the fridge section.

There's fresh meat! Lots of cuts of it, arranged for display, and employees behind the counter to cut it up how you want it in whatever quantity you like. There's fresh fish similarly.

That's too bad.

His prediction about the milk being pasteurized was correct. We love food safety best practices.

Lovely! What meats do they have? He definitely wants to buy beef, and pork for dumplings, but maybe Greens have different animals that they eat for meat. The same for the fish. He wants...actually his fish vocabulary in Green is lacking but he'll recognize the fish if they have it: he wants blackfin scad and pangasius. 

Do they have offcuts that are significantly lower in price than the normal meat? He's definitely not phrasing himself very well, but what he's trying to convey that if they have animal parts that no one wants like chicken feet or beef tripe that's cheaper, then he wants to buy that for his drones.

Greens apparently eat a lot of chicken and beef, and smaller amounts of pork, lamb, turkey, venison, rabbit, sqaub, and more - it's a big store, it has a bunch of variety and a bunch of cuts. In the fish section they're apparently mad for fat-striped filet of salmon above all others, though escolar is on sale right now, and there's tuna and swordfish and halibut and tilapia and yellowtail and bluefin and more. He might not recognize the fish he has in mind, actually. None of them larger than sardines are sold whole.

He can have fish trimmings - skin and bones and heads and such - for quite cheap. There's less of that in the meat section, they don't do much of the butchering on-site here, but he can get bird skin likewise cheap and they have a small inexpensive selection of animal brains for a few customers from abroad who like them.

This is great! He will get one whole chicken, a kilo of ground pork, and two cuts of steak: a t-bone and a prime rib. 

Salmon seems to be very popular so he'll get some of it. He's unfamiliar with escolar though. He indeed doesn't recognize any of the fish and has to resort to looking up words on his phone to ask the person at the counter for it. He will get them filleted. 

He will definitely get the fish trimmings and bird skin, but not the animal brains – he was taught very young Not To eat the brain and spine for fear of prior disease. He will get a few kilos of that if he can get it, actually, since the drones will be running around a lot more than usual and he thinks they could use it. 

He will ask whether he can get the address of their butcher.

"Uh, sure, but I don't think they serve customers on the premises," says the shopkeeper, hunting for some relevantly labeled packaging. "If you're looking for something weird like pig trotters you probably want the specialty place in Westmeadow."

Damin ponders for a moment before realizing – oh, they're thinking that I'm deliberately looking for these things rather than 'it's very cheap food that I can use to supplement my drones' diets so they don't get kwashiorkor or micronutrient deficiencies'. He decides not to explain this and instead thanks the person – he has to override his learned habit to talk to the person at the counter as though they were a drone – to terminate the conversation.

Time for starches. He is looking pasta, flour, and root vegetables. The pasta can be of any shape, but he prefers the chunky shapes like fusilli and penne, which is also shared by most Zmavlipre. If they have alkaline noodles or egg noodles he's also interested in that. Actually he might circle back over to the fridge section to see if they have refrigerated egg noodles there.

He wants wheat flour most of all but if they don't have that then he can settle for something else. Oh, and he wants corn starch.

He wants potatoes to go with the meat. And also yam or ube or sweet potato for burtcas. Hm. He might want cassava too, for cassava cake. Maybe some other time, though.

He's not actually so interested bread at this time so much as he's interested in pastries, and he's not sure if the bakery here would have that.

They do have refrigerated egg noodles! The dry pasta comes in several shapes - the nearest Earth equivalents would be penne rigate, rotini, angelhair, bucatini, lasagne, fetuccine, orzo, and assorted novelty pastina. There's also gnocchi and other non-flour shelf-starches here. The filled pasta's all in the fridge or the freezer except for one brand which has thoroughly dried cheese in there.

They absolutely have wheat flour; it's in the bulk section, and a lot of people seem to bring their own containers, though he can also get a paper bag. Corn starch isn't far away.

Potatoes of many kinds - loosely charted by peelability and flesh color - are in produce! They have sweet potatoes and yams; ube is available only in the form of a jam for some reason, in this region. They have cassavas, though not many; there's plenty of tapioca flour in the bulk section though.

The bakery absolutely has pastries.

Actually, he doesn't have much use for pasta right now because he hasn't thought about what pasta dishes he wants to eat. So not the refrigerated egg noodles. He will get penne rigate and fetuccine, though. And dried egg noodles, if they have it. Those will not spoil and won't take up fridge space – he realizes now that the fridge he has is much smaller than fridges in Zmavlimu'e. He will not take any of the filled pasta.

They did not bring containers because they did not bring containers with them from Zmavlimu'e. Bringing your own containers for bulk granulars he is not surprised about, though. He will get paper bags for now and make a stop at a shop for containers either later in the day or tomorrow. He will get a bunch of the wheat flour and some corn starch.

He will get starchy potatoes for mashed potatoes. He decides against getting cassava at this time. Also, he should check now whether Green stores have separate sections for produce that's cosmetically defective but still fine to eat, and is therefore marked down.

He wants to look at the pastries now but resists this impulse, and delays it to afterward when he's checking out the automat.

Actually, do they have rice too? He definitely wants to get rice. He will get white rice because he prefers the taste – people don't really bother with polishing rice for the preservative benefits because of refrigeration, at least in Zmavlimu'e.

They do have dried egg noodles in various sizes.

The paper bags have sticker things on them that he can peel the backing off to close the bag once it's filled to his desired level.

There is a marked down section for ugly or bruised fruit and vegetables, yep!

They have rice and he can get any of twelve different kinds of rice (arranged in a chart of their grain length and color).