The Grocery List Collection in The New York Times
A blast from the past: This is the story Amanda Hesser wrote about me and the Grocery List Collection. It appeared in The New York Times Magazine on October 24, 2004:
If you are what you eat, then you are also what you buy to eat. And mostly what people buy is scrawled onto a grocery list, those ethereal scraps of paper that record the shorthand of where we shop and how we feed ourselves. Most grocery lists end up in the garbage. But if you live in St. Louis, they might have a half-life you never imagined: as a cultural document, posted on the Internet.
For the past decade, Bill Keaggy, 33, the features photo editor at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has been collecting grocery lists and since 1999 has been posting them online at www.grocerylists.org. The collection, which now numbers more than 500 lists, is strangely addictive.
