Want to put together an insider’s rating for refrigerator magnets? It’s been done. Hope to assemble the all-time most intriguing items that ever appeared on a grocery list? That’s been done, too. In fact, it’s a 240-page book. “Milk Eggs Vodka,” by Bill Keaggy will be published by HOW Books in a few months, based around the author’s collection of grocery lists he found abandoned in carts, blowing around in the Safeway parking lot or flapping feebly in the gutter. The enterprising Mr. Keaggy has assembled and organized 1,300 of these lists to reveal that a surprising percentage of Americans do not know how to spell mayonnaise, banana, anchovy and yogurt.

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.