Going grocery shopping is perhaps the most intimate way to get to know a place. The general topic of the cost and availability of consumables we think we need, and learning how to cook with the ones we actually can get and afford, probably dominates 75 percent of our domestic patter."God, I can't believe how good this 2 euro wine is!  I thought manchego would be cheaper. Why doesn't anyone eat fruit???"  This shouldn't be the case since the report on what's cheap and what's not hasn't changed much in the last several hundred years, as witnessed by an article on eighteenth-century rural area to the south of Madrid, above. Translation: wine and olive oil are cheap; fruit is for rich people.