Grocer on Elm Street
The grocery store is a place that forces shoppers to decide what kind of people they want to be on the most literal level imaginable. The raw material stocked in neat pyramids gets picked, rung, bagged and carried home, where it transforms into living, breathing flesh. Selecting what to eat is a momentous occasion, since it literally decides what we will become.
Despite the foundational importance of the process, grocery shopping starts to feel a little weird when one looks too closely at the set and setting. Intrusive questions - who invented these foods? Why are there so many versions of the same product? What are all of these ingredients? Why is it legal for corporations to hold farmers in debilitating debt? Why did 250 million people participate in a general strike in support of Indian farmers? all crowd in, clamoring for an answer.
To understand how we got here, and what can be done about it, we must first go back in time.
A well-rounded meal plan, or at the very least a meal plan that will survive the first phase of the apocalypse.
Twinkies cereal - clearly what David Byrne was thinking about when he kept asking “How did I get here?” over and over again.
To be honest the hunters don’t look like they’ve been getting a lot of food from their efforts, but the larger point still stands - hunter-gatherer is the most “eat local” way of life imaginable.
In the beginning, getting food required a lot more effort on the part of the individual, but it must have also been simpler. The imaginations of anthropologists converge on the idea that the first humans were, like other omnivorous animals, hunter gatherers. Each band of humans was responsible for collecting enough food to last them through the lean times of fall and winter, and that food was presented to them by the planet itself. In this context, the myth of the Garden is simply the story of the time in human history when things weren’t so crowded and the weather was better.
The invention and adoption of our modern structures - industrial agriculture, global supply chains, branding - are descendants of decisions and technologies that were invented as hunting and gathering became difficult. Cities, the most efficient methods of organizing markets that humans have ever discovered, grew sufficiently dense that it was necessary to answer a tricky question: how are we going to escape starvation, if nature doesn’t dependably provide?
The answer was farming - a way of making varietals of wheat and sheep that grow fast and strong, of learning from the turn of seasons what needs done. And it turns out we’re quite good in our ability to farm, as long as the land stays calm. A stable food supply has, over the course of at least ten thousand years of human decisions, been the foundation of every civilization. It’s also been the place where they’re most likely to crumble.
Cows not to scale, but who knows? The pyramids were huge, perhaps so were the Egyptians.
Starving to death is a problem we don’t often consider, since industrial methods of growing, harvesting, and distributing food around the world have nearly made famines a thing of the past. Over just the last sixty years, the rate at which people die in famines has gone down by 100x. For the most part, our problem isn’t dying due to a lack of calories, it’s in our relationship to food and our definition of food. Never have there been so many people cooking and eating alone, going on to form families without the stabilizing force of a strong food culture.
The most recent wave of industrialization of agriculture kicked in full force in the 1950s and 60s - the effect of which can be seen in the way that the annual death rate from famines plummeted. in the decades that followed.
The sheer number of products on the shelves guarantees that the process of picking out what to eat and drink becomes a competition for who can create the most effective marketing campaign possible.
What has emerged is a grocery store that’s less about food and more about marketing, a place where massive supply chains converge, where prices are determined by economic pressures that are the result of non-food items, and where we all, as one, make life-and-death decisions without really knowing what’s happening behind the scenes.
Envisioning a healthier future requires at least a partial fluency with the past. It requires that we assemble a possible story of how it is we’ve gotten here, the impulses that continue to push us to the brink, and what, if anything, can be done to keep it from getting worse.
The next post in this series is going to start down the road of figuring out what got us here - it’s a story of the transition away from subsistence agriculture, the invention of machines that could make more of themselves, the inevitable end of slavery, and the emergence of a key concept that silently shapes all of our lives, every single day - efficiency.
Next time:
Work it Harder. Make It Better, Do it Faster, Makes Us Stronger
How we’ve been molded by the machine age