Sigh. The long weekend is over and it's time to work again. I don't really feel like it, though, so let me tell you a story.
For reasons too boring to get into, yesterday I ended up in a grocery store -- a QFC, part of Kroger's empire -- for a few things. I haven't been to what I'd guess you call an "ordinary" grocery store for quite a while.
It started when I couldn't find organic grapes. Then no organic green beans. Then I tried to find some shampoo for my kids and the only choices were garishly designed bottles with cartoon characters on them and god knows what in them. Then the meat counter ...
It all added up. I was overtaken by the feeling that I was basically surrounded by poisons. I eventually just dropped my half-full basket, walked out, and drove to a Whole Foods.
Yes, my life is a parody of West Coast elitism.
Strictly speaking, what I did was irrational. QFC has plenty of green specialty products, and you can always poke around and read ingredient lists to find healthy stuff. And let's face it, probably half the money I spend on "green" products -- which are much more expensive -- is wasted on clever package design or environmental benefits too infinitesimal to matter. Hell, the gas I used getting to the store probably had more impact than the differences between brands at the store.
But still. I don't want to play sleuth. It takes too much energy and attention. I want the place I shop to do that sleuthing for me. I want to shop at a place where my values are the norm, so I don't have to worry about high-fructose corn syrup around every corner. As a consumer, I have long since made the shift from thinking of healthy, simple, carefully sourced products as a luxury to thinking of them as a baseline. I can't go back to what our culture currently thinks of as normal.
What I'm wondering is, when will the mass grocery shopping public make the same shift? Things certainly seem to be heading that way, but as I discovered yesterday, not quite as much as you might like. The process needs to hurry up, lest my snobbery confine me to a few small neighborhoods in Seattle, like some sort of cultural invalid.
This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!
Ask Umbra on trash, toxics, and tots
Toxic suds want to watch you shower
Comments
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billgee Posted 8:12 am
27 May 2008
Yes, your life is a parody of West Coast elitism.
california.
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purejoyofmovement Posted 8:43 am
27 May 2008
Point is, just because some of us "got religion" doesn't mean the rest of us will follow suit. Just keep doing what you do, and see what happens. We're all doing the best we can.
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Matt G Posted 8:49 am
27 May 2008
(aisle of food appears, meeting my specifications)
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Delay And Deny Posted 9:18 am
27 May 2008
I sympathize. I go into QFC and Fred Meyer and buy...real food! Often my basket has things like steak, fruit, seafood, vegetables.
But then there are all these other people with lots of Frosty Widge-O's and Snack'em/Pack'em Twirled Cheese n' Liverwurst Pads in their cart.
Yes, you could probably reduce a typical supermarket down to 2 aisles of food. In fact, I thought of starting a new chain called..."Two Aisles". It would be one long row of produce and another of meat...and that's it!
Oil Is So Hot!
http://oilismastery.blogspot.com
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Chris Schults Posted 12:18 pm
27 May 2008
In November, we stopped carrying products with high fructose corn syrup.
In August, we discontinued offering plastic bags at the checkout and increased efforts to encourage customers to bring their own bags.
As of last April, no more rBGH in dairy products and all products are free of artificial trans-fats.
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kirasaffron Posted 3:34 pm
27 May 2008
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kirasaffron Posted 3:58 pm
27 May 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 4:30 pm
27 May 2008
Still just one of the lumpenproletariat. Bloggers would certainly be listed somewhere between "tricksters" and "other flotsam" somewhere.
"...the term refers to the 'refuse of all classes,' including 'swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, beggars, and other flotsam of society.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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caniscandida Posted 5:32 pm
27 May 2008
Perhaps it was a bit lumpenish of DR to drop his basket and walk off in a huff, leaving the stockboys, the true Proletariat, to put everything back.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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Trebuchet Posted 11:47 pm
27 May 2008
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amazingdrx Posted 1:06 am
28 May 2008
We do tend to be a plague on the poor proles, who clean up after us and so forth. Hehey.
But can bloggers help bring about a revolution? Saving the planet and enriching the lives of all species? Have we created a new media infrastructure?
Matt Tiabbi was on the Daily Show talking about his new book and mentioned that the two goals of a 911 conspiracy group he joined (to write the book), were to have a movie night and create a new media system for the nation.
He and Stewart laughed and laughed, but it struck me that netizens have already done the second. Eureka! Unfortunately, the most powerful part of it seems to be sites like Drudge that do nothing but spread corporatist propaganda and tabloidism.
Grist is surely a shining media nightlight in the darkness of internet insanity.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Wolverine Posted 2:23 am
28 May 2008
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kmp Posted 3:03 am
28 May 2008
I came to this realization a month or two ago, when, for reasons involving a "1-hour" auto tire store conveniently located in strip-mall-hell, I ended up eating lunch at an Applebee's.
First, I tried to avoid meat, guessing that Applebee's is not overly concerned with small-farm, humane, organic, pasture-raised animals. Pretty much impossible to avoid meat at Applebee's; as I recall, my choices were onion soup (still slatered in cheese) and a side "Caesar" salad. I opted for a spinach salad topped with grilled chicken. I had recently read a piece here on Grist about the Organic Center's new classification of pesticide load on domestic and imported fruits and vegetables. I think that same week there was an article on the nastiness that is conventional dairy farming. So, of course, when my massive bed of California-grown, CO2-intensive baby spinach arrived, topped with CAFO chicken breast, dried out slivers of some form of cheese, roasted red pepper (imported red peppers very high on the toxic list), I found myself losing my appetite. I remembered reading that conventional onions have a very low pesticide load, so I latched onto a few slivers of Vidalia onion like a shipwreck victim finding fresh water. As I watched the restaraunt fill up around me, with everyone happily munching away on this stuff, the thought of which was turning my stomach, I felt like Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green, feebly protesting that once, there was real food, and it was good.
It was about this point that I pushed away my uneaten salad, finished my soda water, left a $20 on the table and walked out the door, realizing that I'm just not equipped to function in mainstream America.
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Baby Boomer Posted 3:21 am
28 May 2008
So Dave, on Monday I'm dining with two of your 2nd cousins, once removed, who are 4 and 5. Up until 4 months ago, they had only eaten foods like chicken nuggets and hot dogs so the older one was bragging how he was eating healthy now. Then we got into a conversation about where the food in the grocery store comes from. This kid is really horrified to know that animals make up his favorite foods.
I don't think he'll become a vegetarian, but at least he thought about the hot dog he was eating.
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kirasaffron Posted 12:39 pm
28 May 2008
Yard chickens are the best. They're so much better than organically grown chickens, too. They're better than chicken grown on farms in foriegn countries and served in cities. I actually have stopped eating chicken in the U.S. after a trip to the tropics. I had weekly meals of fresh chicken for $1.50 at the town restaurant. Nothing has been better than pollo from gallinas that can actually walk around and eat insects at will.
This reminds me of something really gross I saw the other day that may make me afraid to eat eggs. There was a hard-boiled egg with this really weird sea-shell-like hollowed out imprint in it. The yolk was about a fourth its normal size and looked like a cashew. I wouldn't want to eat that, and I will never know when I'm eating an abnormally developed egg unless I boil it and look!
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Payton Chung Posted 8:43 am
29 May 2008
Problem is, the huge corporations which appear to dominate retail these days only care about market share -- a metric which values "being all things to all people" over doing one thing very well. That said, even those metrics have their limits and eventually growth plateaus, the stock's outlook drops, and those particular retail concepts will die.
All of this is to say: the ground is shifting beneath Kroger's feet. If they don't do a better job of helping their customers find the products they want (and the natural foods market is growing fast), then they're in trouble -- nimbler merchants will grab their customers. And it will serve them right.
(Even though I write like a capitalist, I truly adore Marxist phrases. Maoist press releases are the best.)
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levijw Posted 5:04 am
02 Jun 2008
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