The messages: Alison Healy on great shopping lists of history

I recently found a shopping list in my supermarket trolley and am still wondering about its author. There were only three items, and they were written as follows: “cauliflower, champagne, 1 tomato!” The trolley seemed unnecessary unless the shopper was buying industrial quantities of cauliflower and/or champagne. And who buys a solitary tomato? Was it a centrepiece for a cheerless champagne and cauliflower soirée? And why the exclamation mark after the tomato? So many questions.

Some people see artistic merit in discarded shopping lists. Australian artist Kenny Pittock created an award-winning piece of work around shopping lists found in the supermarket where he worked. “Fifty-Two Shopping Lists Written by People Who Need Milk – acrylic on ceramic” won a $10,000 prize for emerging artists in 2017. Enough to fund a lifetime supply of milk, I’ll wager.

American writer Bill Keaggy has produced a book documenting the more interesting shopping lists that came his way since he started his grocerylists.org website more than 20 years ago. The Milk, Eggs, Vodka book includes lists written on court documents, clothing tags and scraps of wood.

Some of the lists tell their own stories. Sad stories. I’m thinking of the shopper in search of “Prozac, kids’ hair detangler, ibuprofen, Fibre-all, and Sensodyne.” Who wouldn’t pity that stressed, headache-riddled, sensitive-toothed, constipated parent of a child with knotty hair?

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But those shopping lists can’t hold a candle to the list created by Galileo Galilei. It is reproduced, with many other great lists, by Shaun Usher in his book Lists of Note. Galileo wrote the list after he had produced a telescope in August 1609. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with the telescope, and he drew up a shopping list of items on the back of a letter, to improve it.

He must have been planning a visit to the 1600s equivalent of a German discount store with a middle aisle because the shopping list was quite eclectic. Sugar, pepper, cinnamon and lentils vied for space with shoes and a hat, two artillery balls, iron-turning chisels and German lenses.

I don’t know if it was the pepper or the iron-turning chisels, but the shopping trip was a resounding success. Two months later, his upgraded telescope discovered Jupiter’s moons.

But surely the award for the most elegant shopping list of all time must go to Michelangelo? In 1518, the Italian artist wrote a list of foods on the back of a letter, accompanied by beautiful pencil illustrations. It is the most Italian shopping list you could conjure up, with jugs of wine, tortellini, spinach, anchovies and fennel. Some people believe it was illustrated for the benefit of his illiterate servant. Others say he was just doodling. Whatever the truth, it is magnificent, and rest assured that no shopping list you will ever write will look as good as Michelangelo’s.

Charles Darwin mightn’t have been as artistic, but he was a great man for compiling lists. When the naturalist was contemplating marriage in 1838, he generated a hefty list of pros and cons.

You can only hope that his eventual wife, Emma Wedgwood, never stumbled across his decidedly unromantic musings. In the list of things recommending marriage, Darwin noted that the female of the species was an “object to be beloved and played with – better than a dog anyway … someone to take care of house”. Included in the list of things advising against marriage were: “Conversation of clever men at clubs – Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle”.

But the lure of a “nice soft wife on a sofa with a good fire” convinced him and he married his cousin Emma six months later. They enjoyed 43 years of marriage before he died in 1882. His worries about the expense and anxiety of having children must have faded as they had 10 children, seven of whom survived into adulthood.

Leonardo da Vinci was another man fond of list-making, but his to-do lists are slightly more ambitious than most. One of them suggests getting the master of arithmetic to show him how to square a triangle. Other lists prompt him to observe the holes in the substance of the brain, describe a woodpecker’s tongue and to give the measurement of a dead man using his finger as a unit.

Useful things to know, I’m sure, but where’s his list of mundane tasks? It’s all very well being able to describe a crocodile’s jaw but that’s not going to put milk in your tea or collect the dry-cleaning.

That’s da Vinci for you. He might be a genius at anatomy drawing but he’d forget his head if it wasn’t attached to his spinal column via his cervical vertebra.