You'd Butter Believe It!

Many writers (like Bill Bryson and Stephen Clarke to name but two) have written about their experience of living or travelling in a foreign country. Living myself outside of my home country, I thought “why not sharing some of the adventures I lived when I still was a newcomer in the country of Her Majesty?”

Shortly after arriving somewhere, one of the first things one usually does is look for food. That’s something natural to do really. So one of the first things I did after arriving in the country was to look for food too.

If you think that going shopping in a foreign supermarket is going to be easy – I don’t mean to discourage anyone here but – you’re wrong. Although the “concept” of supermarket is the same, I wasn’t prepared to enter a whole new world (I will come back on that in a later post).

When I think about it now I can’t help thinking that this experience proved at least one thing: the choice of your brand name is essential.

The thing when you are new in a country is that you haven’t grown up with the local brands and therefore you know nothing about them, you don’t have your favourite brands yet and most importantly, you don’t know what brand to trust.

I came to this simple conclusion in the dairy section while I was looking for butter. There I was welcomed by a shelf crammed with – mainly yellow – tubs (as if the wealth and success of a country could be measured by the amount of the same stuff you can display on a supermarket shelf!). Some call it “choice”. Choice is good when you know the brands or have at least heard of them before. In my case back then, having the choice didn’t prove great as it confused me even more. But let’s go back to that shelf crammed with tubs. In France, butter is usually sold wrapped in foil and it’s the margarine that is sold in tubs. At that point I thought that surely British people too liked spreading butter on their toast so I started exploring the shelf more thoroughly. Not knowing anything about the brands I had in front of me wasn’t helping at all. Imagine looking for something and not knowing what this thing looks like or basically picture Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade, when he is facing all those Grails and needs to pick the right one; well, that was pretty much me looking for some butter that day.

So how did I choose in the end (no, I didn’t give up!)? I ended up picking a brand with the word “butter” in it: that was what I was looking for and therefore it was reassuring. In addition to that, the brand name managed to make me laugh (which is quite unexpected when you are in the dairy products aisle) making this whole first experience in a foreign supermarket on my own less traumatic. “You’d Butter Believe It!” That name has made me smile ever since, despite the fact that I have tried many other butter brands since then.