Figure 1: Grand Grocery Co, Lincoln Nebraska by John Vachon. Source: Library of Congress.
Thanks alot, Micheal Pollan.
As household errands go, I used to really enjoy a trip to grocery store. Now my nerd ass can't even pick up a few groceries without internal dithering over the offerings of each aisle.
A few days ago, I visited my local Rainbow, which I normally don't visit (I prefer Cub Foods) but it is close to my daughter's preschool and gas ain't cheap.
I went in to pick up some fruit and cereal and spent 45 minutes contemplating the astonishing array of ludicrous food products that come boxed, packaged, canned and stacked, marketed to our hungry famine genes and sure to make us fat.
Once you've read Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals , every single motherfucking choice in the grocery store is freighted with politics. (And Pollan's gone and written a new tome called In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, which I tremble just thinking about. Jesus, man! Can't you let the ramparts of my fragile world stop shaking before you unleash more?)
Oh, don't throw out that "Just Go to the Farmer's Market!" tagline to me. I live in the heartland, where we grow corn that gets processed into fruit roll-ups and fattening syrupy fillers, where our farms are currently under 2 feet of snow. Ain't nothing local to eat right about now, cepting twigs and dogshit supplied by my annoying neighbor's bug-eyed Basenji, who've we've renamed Silent But Deadly.
Among my ponderings:
- To buy bananas or to let growing leg-pain-having child suffer the liver-crushing wrath of ibuprofen every night, when bananas help relieve these torments of youth? Those feminists were right. The political truly is personal. And it's waking me up every night screaming in pain.
- Frankenfood? What the fuck is this? Toaster strudels, Disney-embossed fruit leather, instant pasta bowls, pesto-flavored crackers - what would my great-grandmothers think of all this shit?
- Why must everything be fortified with something else? Breakfast cereal made from whole grains and enhanced with decaffeinated white tea extract - why not just drink white tea and boil up some oats? Granola bars fortified with Omega-3 acids? We've gone totally crazy with our ideas of what food should be and that's why Americans have no national cuisine to speak of. Instead we're bereft amidst the legions of marketing campaigns for foods that don't taste good, don't resemble food and usually end up making us unhealthy.
- Dieting experts have been recommending recently that we shop around the perimeter of the grocery store, eating "whole foods" like vegetables, fruits, cheeses, meats and grains. Shocking, isn't it? That what keeps you fit are actual plant and animal products that are more resistant to the greedy clutches of marketing campaigns? The majority of the store is dedicated to food products that are bad for you, that are packaged wastefully and that line the pockets of Big Ag.
Figure 2: Negro Grocery Store, Black Belt, Chicago, Illinois by Edwin Rosskam. Source: Library of Congress.
I often think about Cargill when I grocery shop. When I worked there, looking at the directory of departments was sickening. For example, here are some department names:
Sweeteners. Sauces, Oils and Dressings. Juice. Cocoa and Chocolate. Texturing Solutions. Animal Nutrition. Meat Solutions.
I don't know about you, but personally? I have never had a problem that requires a "meat solution."
Insert dirty penis joke, I know. But really, the only "meat solutions" I can think of would involve avoiding BSE, E.coli, and the exploitation of workers. None of which Cargill, with its global approach to food distribution, can fix for me.
And texturizing? Ugh. That just means, hey, let's stick some of our surplus corn product into your yogurt/cracker/ice cream and thus stretch it out further and change the mouthfeel so you'll slobber down larger quantities. Saves us money while you get less and spend more! Woo!
What this means to me is that there is a huge refrigerated case full of yogurts I don't want to buy. They are covered in Disney characters and packaged in non-recyclable plastic and filled to brimming with high fructose corn syrup, starches and other junk that has nothing to do with milk. In fact, all I want is the plain yogurt, please, and that is the most expensive one, even when compared to the brands that brag "Enriched with Vitamin A" or "Live Acidopholus Cultures!" on the container.
Figure 3: New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Stairway with display of a sample of the foodstuff collected by one household Uptown from Red Cross food distribution in October. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
So go live in California, some might say, where you can pick oranges off trees and live the good life. Quitcher bitchin about grocery shopping!
I don't think there should be an end to refrigeration or survival in cold climes. I just think it's a damn shame that 95% of that building we know as the grocery store is full of shit that makes us unhealthy, fat and/or sick.
Food that we can afford, that is free of chemicals and unhealthy bullshit, is nothing less than a human right. Bugger off, Big Ag, with your grandiose notions of "Nourishing Ideas. Nourishing People." You're making a shit load of money because you're making us sick.
