Right up the road from the Weaverland Auction, there’s an unnamed farm stand, its open front covered with plastic sheeting as protection against the bitter cold. Before I was fully bundled up and ready to leave my car, an Old Order Mennonite woman pulled up on a bicycle (towing a trailer believe it or not), pushed the plastic aside, and began to shop.

We called the land “rich,” and yet, so many of the people who live on it are close to broke. There are tiny discount grocery shops all over Lancaster County. Usually run by Plain people and open to all, they’re where we foreigners expected to find the keys to the simple life and instead see more than our share of tubs, packages, and powders.

There were bags of produce, undoubtedly from the auction, and plenty of past-date and scratch and dent processed food at insanely low prices, all self-service. You put your money in a slot, no change given. I bought a sack of tomatoes, and some asparagus too. The woman scrutinized it all. Plain people were supposed to be the purist of souls; growing, consuming, and happily selling pure food. Instead, they were searching for cheap cans and jars. She studied the soups and seasoning packets, skipped them, and left empty-handed.

This was rural Pennsylvania poverty. At its worst, you spent your days working the land, growing the perfect produce city dwellers cherished while you yourself ate processed and over-processed food so you could spend more hours in the fields. Only people with enough time and money had the luxury of clean, wholesome food.

At Springville Foods, a rural and well-hidden Amish grocery store ten miles down the road, the story played out once again. On a porch fronted by farm fields and with a parking lot holding more buggies than cars, I found canned sodas and energy drinks stacked up at the door. I don’t think the Amish have a particular fondness for them, instead, they’re the icon of the overworked.

Nothing here was for tourists and even the “busy mothers” cookbooks seemed aimed at the locals. Who could possibly be busier than an Amish mother? Yet, nobody was in a hurry, the (mostly) Amish shoppers pushing carts around me moved slowly, stopping often to chat in Pennsylvania Dutch. Despite the small size of the store, people would socialize each time they passed in the aisles.

Forget those cute little shops in Intercourse, this is the best place you could go on a visit to Amish Country. Restrooms are clean, coffee is free, and sandwiches are cheap enough for anybody to afford. Nobody Plain will invite you into their living room and none of the people milking cows has a second to greet you. The only authentic places with open doors are these tiny food stores.

Every aisle had a lesson in how Amish and modern values collide. Diabetes treatments were shelved a few short feet away from fifty pound sacks of white sugar. You could actually shop for bulk sugar here comparing branded sacks of twenty-five and fifty pounds. There was enough junk food to kill a large family.

Bulk-packed was the name of the game. Even herbal tea bags were sold that way. Prices for grains, flours, spices, and baking supplies were about as low as you could imagine. Mostly, it was just plastic bags or containers with a store label. For example, instant gelatin dessert powders were sold by the pound. Did they make this stuff themselves? Buy it from some mega food processor? As far as I could tell, these small plain grocery stores all sourced their bulk stock from the same wholesaler; Walnut Creek in Ohio.

Springville had lots of canning supplies. Lids, jars, and other items were out in heaps; you could buy them one at a time if they were all you needed. Being a gringo, I thought local farmers put by hundreds of cans. Maybe they did. But rural poverty set the tone. Jars were expensive and if you bought everything separately as you needed it, you could recycle and save precious pennies.

The narrow aisles at Springville held more questions than products. Books with titles like “Be Your Own Doctor” sat among all sorts of “remedies.” So much energy was devoted to “boosting your immune system.” It may have been a reaction to Covid 19, or maybe an alternative to the entire medical establishment.

How cheap is this place? Velveeta is the most expensive cheese cheap. As it should be! It has the longest shelf life and needs no refrigeration – two great attributes in the Plain mindset.

I visited at least a half a dozen of these stores and the story was always the same; a stunning location at the edge of fertile fields, a tiny building with skylights, a deli counter, and bulk food: plastic bags of flour, cereal, spices, and sweets, coolers with big slabs of cured meat and cheese, and shelves of herbal medicines.

… And always that sound; the hissing of a leaking bicycle tire. There are no bicycles at all. It’s their gas lamps. Strict Amish businesses weren’t lit with nice, quiet electricity, they had gas-fueled lanterns that reminded the rest of us of camping trips. They grudgingly used electricity for fridges and freezers, but when it came to artificial lighting, gas was the rule.

You might think Amish life is filled with food harvested from their own soil, but there’s more to the story. This is a unique combination; sacks of flour, sugar, and oats, more frozen fish sticks and hash browns than most of us could imagine, and all those extracts and tinctures that are supposed to be for health, but scream of sickness. What you really need to know is on display for anybody who chooses to visit, buy a sack of flour, and look around.