Welcome back to Table Talk, where Daily Memphian food and dining editor Jennifer Biggs and her colleagues send the latest food news (along with a dash of this and that) directly to your inbox every Wednesday.

In 1916, Memphis introduced the world to a new concept: the supermarket. 

Instead of making separate stops to a butcher shop and a bakery and a produce market and a general store, you could do all of your grocery shopping in one place. And instead of handing your list to a clerk, you could push your own cart around a store and have more control over your shopping destiny.

Piggly Wiggly was new, and it was the future. 

Was that a good thing? Sometimes I wonder. Like Holiday Inn, another Memphis business with a feel for the future, Piggly Wiggly tapped into the changing habits of a century that would be defined by cars, of a country where urban would soon sprawl into suburban and mobility would become more of an individual matter, where roadside hotels and big box stores fronted by parking lots would both be emblematic of the rise of the automobile. 

I still kind of like that older urban ideal of specialty store shopping rather than filling up one cart in one place but, like most people, I do the bulk of my shopping inside a big box, fronted by a big parking lot.

The reliance on supermarkets for food in sprawling cities has created its own problem: food deserts, the absence of supermarkets in places where they don’t pencil out, with the mom-and-pop shops of yore a less common alternative. 

So one good piece of Memphis food news this week was the insistence by the new owner of the local Save A Lot grocery franchise that he wants to reinvigorate his four Memphis stores — in Parkway Village, Raleigh, Westwood/Whitehaven and the University District — by keeping them “full and fresh” and customizing each store’s inventory to the demographics and desires of its neighborhood.

Sounds great. Let’s hope the follow-up meets the promise.

This inspired some conversation on this week’s Sound Bites podcast, on which digital director Holly Whitfield and I talked about our own Memphis grocery shopping habits. Holly, like a lot of Memphians, does the bulk of her shopping at Kroger. 

I confessed that my Saturday morning shopping routine often consists of four stops: Big box stops at Target (dry goods, cleaning supplies and staples) and either Whole Foods or Fresh Market (meat, fish and produce), often bracketed by a morning trip to one of the farmers markets and a quick stop at some kind of specialty stop, depending on what I’m planning on cooking. 

I could lament that I find it pretty impossible to do all of my shopping at one place, even if I focused on a more traditional supermarket such as Kroger or Superlo (both of which I do shop at from time to time). But the reality is that I kind of like making multiple stops and enjoy getting things from different places.

In addition to ingredients from the big boxes, one week of meals — I cook a lot, or try to — might include produce from the farmers market and bread from La Baguette and spices from Penzeys and meat from Casa Perez or the former Charlie’s Meat Market and noodles or curry paste or any number of things from Viet Hoa Market. Or from lots of other places, too.

Supermarkets have changed the way we shop, and the sprawl of Memphis has made shopping heavily car-dependent. In this week’s Daily Memphian Mayoral Debate, candidate Paul Young mentioned a shuttle service he thought would primarily be used by people to get to work was in fact mostly used by residents of North Memphis’ Klondike and Smokey City neighborhoods to get to the Kroger at Poplar Avenue and Cleveland Street.

People have to work hard enough to afford to put food on the table. They shouldn’t have to work that hard to physically get it. 

Here’s hoping for better access to supermarkets in all nooks and crannies of a sprawled-out Greater Memphis. But here’s also a shout-out to the bakeries and butcher shops, farmers markets, culturally-specific smaller grocers and specialty stores. All the smaller places make for a more interesting food city.

Speaking of a spread-out Memphis, we had food news from all over since last week’s Table Talk. In addition to the grocery store news in that quartet of aforementioned Memphis ‘hoods, we went to...

Near Bartlett: Where the second Memphis location of the drive-thru 7 Brew coffee chain will open on Whitten Road later this month.

Midtown: Where the decade-old small-batch brewery Memphis Filling Station is eyeing its first brick-and-mortar location. 

Hernando: Where Joshua Carlucci drops in on Wild Cultures Sourdough Bakery, a pandemic project that has fermented into something quite tasty. 

Collierville: Where a mother-and-daughter team have turned a former doughnut shop into charcuterie shop Graz’n Tables but have not forgotten the doughnuts. See, you can have it all.

Summer Avenue: Where Carlucci enjoyed kimchi dumpling soup at Ryu and a sour apple and sea-salted caramel concoction at the new Jeremiah’s Italian Ice — probably not on the same trip. 

East Memphis: Where the handsome new Irish restaurant Bog & Barley is introducing Sunday brunch.

Cordova: Where Holly and I began last week’s “Sound Bites” by revisiting my recent Germantown Parkway food tour. 

Downtown: Where Midsouth Coffee & Tea Co. will seek to keep those who live and work on the South end of Downtown caffeinated and, hey, that’s us at The Daily Memphian. This news could be highly relevant to the future production of this newsletter.