What is 100 Days of Groceries?

The aesthetic of the well-stocked storefront is identifiable across many cultures, and yet, each grocery store offers new and exciting things to offer, to explore. Upon travelling, the first thing I always do is explore the places where I can shop for food. It is a comforter. When I travelled abroad alone for the first time in my life to work in San Francisco, for my first two days I was unable to do anything but explore the multitude of
grocery shops in the Mission District. It was so different to anything I had ever seen before; and yet familiar, comforting, exciting, exotic, overwhelming.

Upon moving back to my childhood home in North-West London I felt a newfound pride in my local grocery stores. Predominantly South Asian-run, they offered a myriad of stories and colours I wished to uncover, to
record. When my grandparents moved from Pakistan to England, they started a variety of different businesses, one of which was a grocery store.

100 Days of Groceries is a photography project, exploring the aesthetics of buying groceries, documenting mostly independently owned stores in which people can buy food; greengrocers, corner shops, newsagents, markets, butchers, bakeries, fishmongers, etc. Each post will document a different establishment. Some of the photographs are taken in passing, but some of them I visited specifically. Some documentations will be accompanied by text, either conversational interviews with the workers in the shops, or simply my own observations of the shop at the time.

I had the idea for this project back in November 2019, and some of the interviews and questions are taken then, but I thought that now, during the Covid-19 pandemic, would be a good time to go live with the project. Although we are well into the lockdown and perhaps restrictions will still be lifting soon, our local grocery shops and corner stores have remained open throughout as ‘essential businesses’. While long queues still form and shelves of goods go out of stock in major retailers, many of us have begun to go back to buying our
groceries at more independently owned shops.

This project isn’t intended to be updated every single day, but the aim of this project is to document one hundred different places where you can buy groceries, and hopefully the resulting collection of photographs will be a kaleidoscope of groceries. I hope you enjoy the pictures I’ll share in this blog. I’ll also be updating the project on my Instagram: @vegetable.peeli, and also on Facebook.

Additionally, if you are the owner of a grocery store (or similar) and wish to be interviewed and have your establishment featured in this project, please get in contact. You can email me at neelimalik.art@gmail.com