Class: Potions (Professor Muddlenook)
Pairs with: the class's lessons on ingredients and where they come from (see the Potions class page).
Trip type: Market / Grocery Store / At Home
Where it works: any grocery store, market, or spice shop. The bigger the spice aisle, the better the hunting, but a small shop with a bulk bin section will do. Free: buy nothing just for the trip. One good pass through the aisles.
Why we're going: The Potions lessons follow ingredients through history: where the dried roots, barks, seeds, resins, and flowers came from, and how the old shops stocked them. This trip checks the end of that journey. The trade never actually stopped; it just moved into supermarkets, where the apothecary's stock sits between the pasta and the tea, priced by the ounce.
The mission: The modern apothecary is hiding in plain sight. Ingredients your Potions lessons treat as history are sitting on ordinary shelves with price tags on them. Go and find them where your neighbors buy dinner. You will come home with five lesson ingredients found in the wild of the weekly shop, each with its shelf name, its form, and where the package says it grew.
What to record:
Find five ingredients from the Potions lessons on sale. Write down each name exactly as the package gives it.
Note the form each one is sold in: whole, ground, dried, oil, tea, or extract.
Record the price of one ingredient and where the package says it was grown.
Find one ingredient sold in two different aisles for two different purposes.
Copy the oldest-sounding name you can find on any label in the shop.
How it runs:
Level One — At Home: Do the same hunt in your own kitchen. Open the spice cupboard, the tea box, and the baking shelf, and inventory them like an apothecary's stock: five ingredients from the lessons, their forms, and where each package says it came from. Most scholars finish this level surprised at how much of the old shop they already own.
Level Two — In Person: Go to the store or market with your notebook. Work the spice aisle, the tea shelf, the baking section, and any bulk bins, and complete the recording there. If the market has stalls, compare one ingredient at two stalls: form, price, and where it was grown.
Picture ideas for the gallery:
The spice aisle or bulk bins, the modern apothecary at full stretch.
A package whose label names where the ingredient was grown.
One ingredient in two forms, whole and ground, side by side.
Your own kitchen stock, inventoried like a shopkeeper's shelf.
Etiquette & safety: A shop is a workplace. Keep notebooks out of the way of carts, never open packages that are not yours, and buy nothing just for the trip. Labels on food are information about food, not remedies, whatever the packaging implies.
Field Report: Which ingredient surprised you most by being ordinary, and which one surprised you by being hard to find? File your report in the comments: where you went, what you found, one thing that surprised you. Photographs go to the Field Trip Gallery through the form on the Field Trip Office page, with the town and country where they were taken.
