Stand and deliver: Marisa McClennan sniffs out anecdotes amid the fruits and vegetables.

Meat and Greet

A writer mines Reading Terminal for first-person stories.

by Mara Zepeda

Before moving to Philadelphia in 2002, Marisa McClellan had never bought meat that wasn’t “stamped with a sell-by date and prepackaged in Styrofoam and shrink wrap.” The first time she visited Reading Terminal Market—where butchers deftly swaddle steaks in paper and then hand over a plastic bag smeared with residual gore—she knew she wasn’t in Walla Walla, Wash., anymore.

Since then McClellan’s been smitten by the place, and in late May started a summer blog project (www.storiesfromreadingterminal.com) that unearths the buried tales, memories, recipes and recollections of Reading Terminal’s vendors and visitors. Three days a week, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., McClellan wanders the aisles, approaching strangers and asking them to dish.

“It’s like experiencing the first day of school over and over again,” says McClellan. “Like, ‘Please, will you please talk to me?’” Few sane adults would choose to relive that experience, or endeavor to extract stories from the hungry hordes of gawking tourists elbowing their way to the cheesesteaks. And yet McClellan, a writing studies graduate student at St. Joe’s University, has taken on the challenge. (In the grade school cafeteria, I’d wager she sat at the geek’s table, obsessively observing the nuanced ritual of consumption and scribbling furiously in her notebook.)

I join McClellan during a midday shift to see her story solicitation in action. An elderly woman in a sun hat paws through ears of corn at OK Lee Produce, scrutinizing each one. At first glance she looks grouchy. There’s no way she’s going to talk to us.

McClellan approaches tentatively, gives an abbreviated spiel about the project, and the lady’s face transforms from suspicious scorn into curious delight. Eighty-year-old Ukrainian-born Anna Lycho tells McClellan of her daily visits to the market, where she sniffs out bargains and monitors the price competition between the produce vendors in a way only someone who lived through the second World War can. In the span of 10 minutes they talk about Iraq, the importance of eating vegetables, crime, spendthrift whippersnappers, social security, the good old days of summertime sleepovers in Fairmount Park and how to prepare snow peas.

McClellan’s posts regale readers with shopping minutiae and anecdotes. At Iovine Brothers a cashier quickly reverses the bad omens of a $6.66 purchase by shaving off a penny so that “it no longer showed the numerical sign of the devil.” She writes about the students who witnessed a man shaving with a pocketknife in the bathroom and, cringing at the thought, scurried off to buy the transient a disposable Bic.

McClellan soldiers on despite rejection (one day she approached 12 people and no one talked). Like a boar rooting for truffles, she knows she’ll succeed by following her nose.