Deconstructing The Grocery Store

 

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. 

Comments

[Wendy]

An enjoyable read - Thanks for the post.

[Esther]

Thanks ! I'm going to the supermarket tomorrow(once every 2 weeks)...sighing and being angry and desperate in front of all those overcrowded shelves...I'll try for sure to buy "simple" things...but not so easy !
I also live in a area covered with snow(Quebec province,Canada) and gardening is far away in time and I won't move to California !

[Esther]

Thanks ! I'm going to the supermarket tomorrow(once every 2 weeks)...sighing and being angry and desperate in front of all those overcrowded shelves...I'll try for sure to buy "simple" things...but not so easy !
I also live in a area covered with snow(Quebec province,Canada) and gardening is far away in time and I won't move to California !

[Carrie]

It's really difficult in colder climates to feel good about "whole foods" in the winter time. I've avoided bagged salads since reading Pollan's book, but I used to live off them.

I've tried many winter vegetables (potatoes, squash and such) and enjoy citrus more in the winter.
It gets me down.

But I think there's a way to not buy into the bullshit marketing in any event. Support your local bakery, instead of buying Wonder bread, for example.

Welcome to my blog and thanks for your comments!

[michelle]

Yeah, what IS up with plain yogurt being the most expensive?! I get so pissed off about that, especially since I eat a lot of it. It might be time for me to dust off my neglected yogurt maker.

[Carrie]

To further annoy the yogurt-lover is the fact that yogurt-makers can't seem to find recyclable yogurt packaging!

It makes me crazy! I can only use so many yogurt containers for tupperware before my cupboards overflow.

I'm also contemplating purchasing a yogurt maker. Fuck 'em!

[Michael]

Just so you know, as of today your blog is the fourth result on Google if one searches for "Cargill sucks" -- and, if quotation marks are used, first! Congratulations :)

And nice entry...

[Carrie]

I would have never known that, so thanks for the tip!

I'm pleased to know that you are searching out the phrase "Cargill Sucks" - gives me hope - and would love to know why...

[Katie]

I'm surprised that, as someone so intimate with thrift stores, your time shopping at Cub and Rainbow sounds even harder than mine.

But maybe that's because I have co-ops within a mile or three if there's anything I can't find on a Cub/Rainbow trip.

Still, I hope I can offer a helpful suggestion--burnt out as you are on thrift stores, go into the grocery store in the same sort of nonchalant way many people who have the money to shop somewhere besides a thrift store "go thrift storing."

Only, yeah, impulse shopping based on what you see is a bad idea in a Rainbow...so...hmmmm...

Well, take a grocery list, but let yourself stray from it along ethical lines.

But not along, "Yum! That looks delicious!" lines.

Doing this, I perused the fish section and discovered that my Rainbow often has frozen walleye in a bag. And I have yet to hear of unsustainable walleye fishing. (Apparently, the reason it's so expensive per pound is that you can't net for it--you have to send people out with fishing lines.) So I bought it, happy to save money over buying it frozen at a co-op or buying it fresh at the fish counter at Rainbow!

Let's see...chocolate. I buy my chocolate, when I do get it (though I'm trying to cut back) from Rainbow, because for some random reason, they're carrying almost-as-cheap-as-Hershey's dark & milk baking chocolate from this Ghanan small company. Though the processing of the cocoa beans doesn't happen in Ghana, apparently the business is set up to let the Ghanan farmers still reap benefits from the sales of the processed product. (I've heard Ghanans make fun of the chocolate industry for not having any production in Ghana, meaning all they get to make $ off of is the raw ingredient.) What else...

...
Oh! Italian-style fancy cheeses, as needed for recipes.

Bel Gioso: not carried by co-ops. Carried by Rainbow & Cub. The ingredient list is pure, I don't think they're a huge huge huge company, and they're cheap as heck compared to any co-op brand of ricotta-in-a-tub.

(But there are certain cheeses for which I still go to the cheapest co-ops I can find--namely, cream cheese. Organic Valley was a rip-off at $4 per 1/2lb, when I thought I could get Roundy's on sale for 90 cents. The Wisconsin-made stuff that's cut from bulk and wrapped in saran wrap at some of the co-ops, well, when not at an overpriced co-op, sells for more like $1.99 per 1/2 lb, which is a decent compromise for me. Especially since I started looking at Roundy's prices again and saw that they've shot up to more like $1.60 on sale!)

Oh, and produce. Rainbow carries Minnesota apples longer than any co-op or farmer's market, and after co-op potatoes from MN/WI had turned green, I saw Rainbow bringing in Russets from WI.

Anyway, I've found these sales by taking a shopping list but being willing to abandon items on it or pick up extras, as I said, with a sort of, "That's neat--lemme buy that, too, and make a note of it" thrift storing mentality. But again, guided by ethics--no straying from the shopping list for flavor, or you get sucked into their subconscious display marketing.

[Kristin]

I just read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I've long been interested in the idea of eating locally but I live in a cold climate like you so I couldn't figure out how the heck to figure it out. Kingsolver explains how her family preserves food during the summer harvest and uses that during winter. Her website www.animalvegetablemiracle.com gives links that show you how to link up with local farmers. Based on her ideas I'm going to learn to can this summer and I've got a grassfed lamb in the freezer.

[Carrie]

I keep meaning to join the co-op. I really do! It would help me with the fact that I'm highly suspicious of everything my regular grocery stores offer.

I loved Animal Vegetable Miracle. A wonderful, absorbing book which inspired me to try to make my own goat milk cheese and let me know that I'm not alone in my gardening/canning/thrifty endeavors.