Cult

Sherry Martin Peters, a flight attendant and founder of Atlas + Wild, has shared a list of her favourite supermarket buys she makes sure to put in her shopping basket when abroad

Is there a sensation that etches itself more deeply and immediately into the British brain than the first time you enter a French supermarket?

I doubt I will ever forget the thrilling aroma of different chilled meats, walking down an aisle of completely unfamiliar cereals, or realising that you can buy small fireworks and about 400 varieties of drink syrup in a single shop.

Supermarket shopping abroad is a serious phenomenon on social media, with more than 50 million posts related to ‘grocery store travel’ on TikTok. It is packed full of travellers showing off their finds and remarking at how different everyday things are abroad.

Last year, travel giant Expedia identified “supermarket tourism” or “Goods Getaways” as a major trend for 2025. The firm predicted that more travelers, particularly Gen Z, would visit foreign supermarkets to find unique products that have gone viral on social media.

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OPINION

Milo Boyd

Sherry Martin Peters, a flight attendant and founder of Atlas + Wild, has avidly visited different supermarkets throughout her long career of jet-setting across the world.

“Tourists seek landmarks and magnets for souvenirs. Flight attendants seek out grocery stores. We know which Lisbon supermarkets stock sangria worthy of wrapping inside a shoe, which Korean store to stock up on collagen face masks, which French markets sell lavender honey that doubles as a sleep remedy, and which South African shelves hold rooibos tea rich enough to taste like rest,” she told the Mirror.

“Fresh Italian pasta. Salted butter from France. Brazilian mate packed between uniforms. Lisbon sardines in artful tins. These aren’t novelty purchases — they are edible memories, our way of claiming a place as lived, not just passed through. If you ever were to peek inside a flight attendants pantry, it’d look like an international grocery store. And that gives us comfort.”

Sherry has shared her favourite foreign supermarkets when travelling abroad, and what she buys in them. “Some of this may be found in specialty stores in the U.S. but we are buying the same at dirt cheap prices,” she notes.

Do you have any foreign supermarket staples or any tips for shopping abroad? We’d love to hear from you. Please email [email protected]

Italy: Carrefour, Coop, and Esselunga

• One litre bottle of “rustic unfiltered” olive oil by Carapelli
• Any Italian red wine that’s about 7-10 euros – they are all fantastic
• Fresh hand-cut pasta from Maffei or from a local pasta shop
• Tomato paste by Tuscanini or Mutti
• Canned tomatoes and tomato sauce by Cento, La Fiammante, Divella and Mutti
• Fresh chunks of Parmesan for grating

France: Monoprix

• Bordier Butter, or Grand Fermage Sel de Mer (sea salt butter) is a cult product
• Lulu Barquettes boat cookies
• St Michel Original Madeleines
• Fleur de Sel gray sea salt
• Duck Confit Reflets De France (duck in a can)
• Torres Truffle potato chips
• Pringles (taste better than in the US)

Portugal: El Corte Inglés and Continente

• Dom Simon sangria (actually from Spain) and cinnamon sticks to marinate it in
• Local wines like Vino Verde, but use the Vivino app to look for ratings to try new ones
• Fresh pastéis de nata (custard tarts Portugal is famous for) from the bakery
• Grand Fermage Sel de Mer butter (French)

Starring Andrew Lincoln and Jack Davenport, This Life was the hit BBC series of the 90s about a group of young lawyers who shared a house and partied hard

It was the massive TV drama that had everyone talking around the office water cooler back in the ’90s – and now, three decades on, you can enjoy the action once more on Amazon Prime.

This Life started in 1996 and spanned 33 episodes across just two series but was included on BFI’s list of the 100 greatest British television programmes and has been hailed by fans as the ‘best British TV drama ever’.

The gritty BBC drama centres around a group of law graduates in their twenties, embarking upon their careers while sharing a house in south London. There are no courtroom scenes and instead the main focus is on their private lives which features everything from infidelity to addiction.

Among the cast are Andrew Lincoln who’s gone on to enjoy a huge career in Teachers, Afterlife, The Walking Dead and the movie Love, Actually. He will soon be seen in the new ITV series Coldwater. Co-star Jack Davenport has gone on to enjoy success in Matt Damon film The Talented Mr Ripley, Pirates of the Caribbean and TV series like Coupling and Smash.

This Life features five main characters living under one roof – Edgar ‘Egg’ Cooke (Lincoln) and girlfriend Milly (Amita Dhiri) along with party girl Anna Forbes (Daniela Nardini), her university ex Myles Stewart (Davenport) and Welshman Warren Jones (Jason Hughes) who was dealing with his sexuality.

The cast also features Ramon Tikaram (Virdie) as Ferdy, Natasha Little as Rachel, Steven John Shepherd (Karen Pirie) as Jo and Luisa Bradshaw-White (EastEnders) ad Kira.

The show, which was created by Amy Jenkins, became a popular word-of-mouth hit and was included on BFI’s list of the 100 greatest British television programmes.

In 2007 there was a special episode, This Life: 10 Years On, which reunited the main cast and explored their lives a decade after the series ended. The special episode focusing on the death of Ferdy and the subsequent gathering of the other housemates pulled in 3.5 million viewers.

Despite it being 30 years old and set in the days well before social media, fans are now enjoying streaming episodes and have been rushing to IMDb with their thoughts.

One said: “I still hold firmly to the belief that the last episode of this landmark show is the best 40 mins of British TV drama ever. Any number of storylines coming sharply to a head, the terrific wedding reception with its toilet sex and terrible dancing, darkest secrets coming horrifyingly to light and the legendary punch.

“But how sad! If we’d known then that there would never be another series we would have stormed the BBC ourselves. But think positive. The show is endlessly rewatchable, and its influence has lived on in Queer as Folk, Attachments, Teachers, Metropolis, Tinsel Town and most contemporary drama since. Just please, please publish the damn scripts!”

Another said: “Move over Friends this is your more intelligent English big brother. A perfect picture of 90s London through the eyes of young professionals and ordinary blokes and girls. A few cheesy performances by Tikarum but it sort of worked at the time much like the Fonz worked in Happy days at the time. Not a poor performance from a rich cast that all went in to achieve memorable careers. This is a collectors piece for those who lived through and experienced the era in London. Nostalgic and immersive TV.”

A third added: “Watching This Life almost 30 years after its release is an interesting experience. Although its format has been much copied since the late 90s, it still retains the same freshness and vitality that made it such a captivating watch first time round.

“The success of the series stems from the fact that it feels so real. Each of the characters is impressively three-dimensional, with both strengths and weaknesses. They’re at that interesting stage of their lives where they’re finding their way in the world while also trying to find themselves, and each of them makes some understandable mistakes along the way.”

This Life is now streaming on Amazon Prime

American Apparel’s billboards were hard to miss when traversing Los Angeles in the 2000s. The ubiquitous ads for the L.A.-based clothing company featured gritty, amateurish photos of seemingly ordinary young women, posed suggestively, in various states of undress. As for the clothing, there wasn’t much of it. A tube sock here, a thong there. American Apparel’s apparel clearly wasn’t the draw.

The underage appearance of the models was disturbing but not entirely shocking given the controversial Calvin Klein ads over previous decades, and by the year 2000, Britney Spears’ schoolgirl-meets-stripper-pole routine in her “Oops! … I Did it Again” video was popular with tweens and moms alike. Yet there was something about the voyeuristic, predatory nature of American Appeal’s ad campaign that felt different, worse, beyond exploitative.

“Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel,” a documentary now streaming on Netflix, explains why those billboards felt more like criminal evidence than sexy ads. The 54-minute film breaks down what was happening on the other side of the camera at the company, led by problematic founder and CEO Dov Charney, and there’s nothing hip or fashionable about the abuse chronicled in it, which features footage, research and firsthand accounts from former employees.

Dov Charney founded American Apparel and was its CEO until he was fired after allegations of misconduct.

(Netflix)

The doc is part of a Netflix series that touches on messy, disastrous events, brands and people such as the Balloon Boy scandal and the so-called Poop Cruise. High-end stuff it’s not, and this installment of the series isn’t nuanced or long enough to be an in-depth exploration of a troubled company and its volatile founder. It does, however, lay bare an abusive culture at American Apparel and how Charney — who shot many of the ads himself — turned his own alleged regressions into a wildly successful branding campaign.

The documentary tracks the rise and fall of American Apparel and its CEO from the company’s inception in 1989 to it becoming one of the largest garment manufacturers in the United States until its bankruptcy in 2015. Reimagining plain sweatshirts and other wardrobe basics as hip alternatives to blingy jeans and gawdy UGG boots, the L.A.-made clothing was promoted as “Ethically Made — Sweatshop Free.” It later garnered the unofficial title of indie sleaze, just in time to resonate across a new thing called social media.

Charney is seen in action through reams of footage captured by employees and others in his orbit. Former workers tell their stories, recalling how they were hired or advanced into management positions despite having no experience. One recalls how new hires at the company received a welcome gift box that included a vibrator, a book by Robert Greene titled “The 48 Laws of Power,” a Leica camera and a Blackberry so Charney could contact them 24/7. They were also asked to sign nondisclosure agreements which would later make it difficult to hold Charney accountable for alleged misconduct.

EJ and Jonny are among the former American Apparel employees interviewed in the documentary. (Netflix)

Footage shows Charney as a wiry, supercharged figure who frequently berated his staff as “losers” and worse. He housed chosen employees at his Silver Lake mansion, the Garbutt House, and they included a gaggle of young women whose roles seemed to be as surrogates and enforcers for Charney — workers referred to them as Dov’s Girls. Then in his 40s, he’s shown verbally accosting young employees, some of whom were teenagers at the time. At least one clip captures him parading around naked in front of two female employees.

After defining fashion for roughly a decade, the thriving company began to nosedive by the 2010s as news of Charney’s inappropriate behavior and oppressive conditions in the workplace surfaced. He was accused of mistreating young employees in the company’s stores and offices, as well as exploiting undocumented employees in the factory, but it was allegations of sexual misconduct and assault in the workplace that made headlines, leading to his ouster as CEO. Women who claim they were sexually assaulted by Charney are interviewed in the documentary.

Charney did not disappear after his fall from grace. He founded another clothing manufacturer, Los Angeles Apparel, and he reportedly works on Yeezy, the fashion brand created by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Rolling Stone reported that Charney printed West’s controversial “White Lives Matter” T-shirt.

As for American Apparel, it was bought by a Canadian clothing company that relaunched the brand shortly before the pandemic. The clothes are no longer made in L.A., but curiously, the indie sleaze billboard campaign has returned to the city. It’s disturbing in a throwback kind of way, pointing to a time when pedo-marketing was king, and the creepy folks behind the ads were heralded as marketing geniuses.