WHEN I WAS a kid, going to the supermarket was a big treat. Growing up in a cheerfully nutty-crunchy family (homemade granola for breakfast, Sesame Street and Masterpiece Theatre, weird carob-and-acerola bars in our lunchboxes), I found supermarkets to be a brilliantly colored, sugar-drenched way into mainstream culture, just as sleepovers at other people's houses were magic-carpet rides to the chemical wonders of Redi-Whip and Fruit Loops. My eldest sister begged for Sugar Pops, and hid the occasional box under the dish towels. My middle sister lingered by the freezer case, entranced by the tidy compartments of Hungry Man dinners. Corn on one side, fried chicken in the middle, and a dessert that magically baked itself, right in the same tray. I, of course, was seduced by the Technicolor splendor of the cake mixes. The colors were better than Barbie: hot pink studded with bits of magenta, gold and cocoa rippled together, silver-white angel food as cool as the moon. Bakery cakes were pretty but inaccessible, neatly round and sealed tight in their skin of icing. The pictures on the Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker boxes always showed towering slices, shot from a fork-ready perspective, as if you were crouched down in front of the plate with the frosting only a lick away.

Unlike, say, airports or Niagara Falls, supermarkets don't get much time as settings for great literature. The best moment in supermarket literature comes from Margaret Atwood, in a scene from her early novel The Edible Woman. The protagonist, whose brain has been forcing her, much to her dismay, to give up all kinds of regular food, finally emerges into sanity, slightly manic but clear-headed, and heads straight to the supermarket. Her own kitchen having descended into a nameless squalor, she fills her cart with everything new, from measuring cups to baking powder, and goes home for a frenzy of baking. At the end of the afternoon, she creates a big, spongy woman-shaped cake, with cascading chocolate curls and a ruffled pink-frosting dress. It's all surreal and bitterly funny, wracked with the slightly queasy sensibility of mid-'70s women's lib, when the ground was still tilting between housewife and career gal, nice girl and sexually liberated woman.

Supermarkets say you can have it all, from soy sauce and shampoo to floor mops and birthday cards. There's a comfort zone there: you know what you'll find, and where. Except, of course, when you don't. Despite their reputation as soulless harbingers of cultural uniformity, supermarkets always have to maintain a spark of regionality to keep their customers loyal. Dairy products, for example, will always tell you where you are. There is no sour cream in Italy. Although there is nothing even remotely resembling bagels, Philadelphia cream cheese is a national staple; bus-shelter ads suggest slicing it into triangles and serving it over green salads. Where American yogurt brands trumpet their lack of fat calories, "cremosa" (creamy) is the selling point of Italian yogurt, for every flavor from torrone (nougat) to frutta di bosco (wild berries). The yogurt section of most European markets quickly spills over into the creamy-dessert section. Not quite puddings, not quite yogurts, these items are mysterious single servings of dense, rich little cream-based treats, like sour cream without the sour. Then come the snacky puddings, from tiramisu to crème caramel and profiteroles, no Jell-O but lots of chocolate mousse in pretty little stemmed plastic cups, complete with blotches of magically unmelting whipped cream on top. In Switzerland, the yogurts are as Alpine as edelweiss; I still have the snowflake-illustrated labels of "winter yogurt" in apple strudel and chestnut flavors.

You can spend a lot of time sipping cappuccino and wandering through Florence's Duomo without ever learning that Italians are obsessed with cookies for breakfast. This is what kids have instead of cereal: handfuls of plain, jam-filled, or multigrained biscuits, not too sweet or rich. Sliced bread for toast isn't a big thing, but premade melba toast (called fette biscotti, or twice-cooked slices) is. Canned soup, no; funghi porcini bouillon cubes, yes. (They're mostly made with MSG, salt, and hydrogenated vegetable oil, but still – porcini! In a cube!) Peanuts in candy bars, no; hazelnuts in every possible variation, yes. Dill pickles, no; single-serve bottles of Campari and soda, yes.