Trip to the supermarket

The Fruit Market by Giacomo Legi, c. 1625

Around a year ago, I started doing my grocery shopping at Whole Foods. It initially started because they're one of the only stores in town that reliably stocks the 4% milkfat Siggi's Icelandic Yogurt. The closest store is about a ten minute drive up I-71, but there are probably a hundred places to buy groceries closer than that. But that yogurt is worth it, and deserves it's own love letter.

This choice dramatically changed my relationship with food. Although ten minutes isn't a long drive, it's just far enough away that I only go to Whole Foods once a week. That means I have to plan for the entire week ahead. Previously, I'd stop at Kroger (about 3 minutes away) roughly every other day to get just what I felt I needed. I never really had anything to eat in the house, so meals turned into a just-in-time operation. That seems romantic, especially when you see movie characters in New York or Paris toting a few things back to their apartment to whip up a nice meal.

But that's not how I experienced it. In reality, in order to make something I had to both go get all the ingredients and then come back home to cook them and then clean up. Way too much work for a starving bachelor who needed something in his belly two hours ago. Instead, I'd often end up getting takeout or drive-thru or during peak pandemic, delivery.

And when I did make it to the store, I'd get some real food, but also smuggle some junk in, especially during those on-a-whim-with-empty-stomach trips. Every other day I had the opportunity to get ice cream and cereal and all kinds of other nutritionally void snacks. My diet for many years was a rollercoaster, and all it took to get off was changing where I shopped. Whole Foods has plenty of trash foods (though still a fraction of supermarkets) but they are expensive and live in packages that make you wonder if it's really going to taste good or not.

Really, the big change has been that I always have food in the house, and none of it of the low quality snack variety. But that means I have to cook pretty much daily. Siggi's might be the only effort-free item in my fridge and pantry, which is why I eat three or four pounds of it a week. Everything else requires some preparation. Thankfully, I love to cook, even moreso when I have a pantry stocked with ingredients I enjoy.

Any more, I probably eat out a couple of times a month, and as time goes on even that feels like too much. Most food not made at home feels like poison to me. Like, the slightest bit of seed oil sends me to bed and I wake up with a hangover. Even tomatoes and peppers are a treat these days after I figured out that they cause me great distress. On one hand, it's painful when I have run-ins with disagreeable foods, and also a bummer that I can't eat much red sauce. But when I steer clear of dietary triggers I feel unstoppable.

Tonight, I made a quick pit-stop at Kroger to restock a couple of things I'd missed during my last trip to Whole Foods. This happens maybe once a month, either when I have an emergency or need to restock something that isn't available at Whole Foods. It's always jarring. Supermarkets are overwhelming, with inventories a hundred times larger and shinier and brighter than a fancy market. And maybe even more interesting is the socioeconomic differences, but I will leave that be for now.

So I enter the lobby and I am immediately greeted by a 64 square foot display of Oreo Cookies and three full pallets of sodapop. That's common fare for supermarkets, or at least Kroger. If I remember correctly (I was a Kroger grocery clerk for a few years), those lobby spots are leased out to Pepsi and Coca-Cola and Mondelez and the rest of the food and beverage industrial complex. Each of those companies have their own merchandisers travel from store to store to manage inventory. Kroger doesn't really want anything to do with it's lobbies because it knows that the big brands are the main attraction.

Anyways, as I walked into this now foreign place, it really struck me that Oreos and Coca-Cola is this week's welcoming committee at the foodstuff palace. Next week it might be Gatorade and Ritz crackers. I'm sure a couple of weeks ago it was comprised of some slightly healthier snacks to coincide with better new year's habits. But in the end, the first thing most people see on their grocery trips is nutritionally garbage. They may pass into the produce section next, but it's too late, they've already been primed to notice the junk.

Once you're in the supermarket, you can confirm that most people are indeed buying this junk. To be blunt, they're fat, often excessively so. I'd wager that the obesity rate in the store is much higher than the national average of 42%. You also can't help but see beyond the body mass and see people who seem to be spiritually helpless. I know, because I've been there before. I don't think psychologists and physicians have the slightest clue what's going on here, but I digress.

Shopping at Whole Foods has been entirely different. Even the boomers are hot there. It's not uncommon to overhear employees sharing their meditation practices or fellow shoppers trading recipes for a good soup. There is sometimes a certain whiff of pretentiousness, but if I'm being honest my snooty detectors are going bad as I become one of those guys myself. I really think Whole Foods may be the closest thing America has to utopia at scale. I'd say it's worth the premium, but over the last year I've significantly cut my grocery bills, so it's actually a bargain.

I'm afraid I have buried the lede here, and the clock is ticking.

What I really mean to say is that us humans are shaped by the ecosystems we inhabit. And, importantly, we don't get much choice about it. And even if we did have tons of variety, the reality is that most people aren't even aware of the situation. They just show up at the nearest grocery store when they need food and sort of follow their desire, which isn't really theirs to begin with, is it?

Some of it is nature, some of it is nurture, but a whole lot of it is something else entirely. Our view of human behavior so often lacks an element of space and time. the nature-nurture argument focuses on childhood development, thinking that even if we are a blank slate, by the age of 7 the rest of our lives are determined. But where is the room for will? Why don't we expect people to change when they leave home at 18 or shack up with a love at 31 or become an empty nester at 55?

Nowadays, people are changing residences faster than the speed of light. They have access to incredible volumes of information that present radically different ways of living? Are we so lazy as to just throw our hands in the air and leave things up to the gods? Or are the capitalists the real gods, and we stomach their soydrinks despite our protest?

The world around me is so clearly sick, so I'm going to need some answers.