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March 28 - April 5, 2023
And yet the grocery store exists as one of the only places where our daily decisions impact—make us complicit in—a system we have come in equal parts to scorn and see as savior.
He projects this decency in a manner that I suspect he would agree is completely disproportionate to his actual integrity and decency; it is a quality he would call “an angle” that he can draw upon or “play” in negotiations. And his acknowledging this gulf only adds to the sense that he is fundamentally sound—grounded, even—about his foibles.
Then, in the 1850s, corrugated cardboard: paperboard folded vertically in arches and smooshed between two horizontal planes like a sandwich. The interior curve gives the material a disproportionate strength. And so inside every flap of cardboard is the science of the cathedral, ten thousand vaulted arches distributing compression, allowing pulp to transcend into something lightweight, rigid, and, above all, cheap. It is the stuff of revolutions.
Suddenly America is awash in advertising lauding the package as proxy for security, as barrier against tampering or fraud.
If we want to think about the introduction of the supermarket as a birth, the cafeteria was foreplay.
Housewives reported feeling faint, dizzy, and flushed from the options.
Today a Costco or Walmart can easily reach 200,000 square feet, a retail environment that could no doubt cause genuine physiological harm to a housewife from the 1930s suddenly transported to its looming halls.
Sylvan Goldman, an Oklahoma City grocer, introduced the shopping cart in 1937.
At the 1956 International Food Congress in Rome—one year before Joe Coulombe would open Pronto Markets—the USDA set up an “American Way exhibit.” It featured the first fully stocked supermarket outside of the United States. This was a modest staging, designed more for easy assembly and dismantling. It held a mere 2,500 brands, a few packaged meats in a lone refrigerated case, and a small selection of prepared food. When the exhibit opened, and crowds finally entered, the Italian women went berserk. One notable enthusiast began running up and down the aisles shouting, “It must be heaven . . .
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What Joe did—was one of the first to do, if not the first—was to create a store that provides products that reflect an identity, that exist in opposition to some generally homogenized mainstream. In the process, by necessity, he commodified individuality itself. He learned to sell you you. If you were the precise you he was after.
L’eggs hosiery sold from a vertical spinning rack that occupied less than one square foot of floor space becomes his Platonic ideal.
“Trader Joe’s was designed for people who had grown up simply like we had, but who had been exposed to new things. Who could speak a new lingo,” Alice says. “People who had gotten an awareness of their intelligence.” “Better educated, not more intelligent,” Joe grunts. “They weren’t any smarter, but college gave them a different vocabulary.” And he decided he was going to give them a chance to flex it while they shopped.
It is here that tiki loses its sincerity but gains its cultural force.
He wanted to flatter his customers’ vocabulary and tickle their minds, not tell them what to buy or convince them his products were the best. “We want to be a chain that requires explanation,”
But somehow it is our lunacy, the ascendant lunacy of my generation, which has put IPO-chasing founders in the same category we once reserved for poets, statesmen, and philosophers.
Then there are jobs where you are designed to fail.
The truth for perishable grocery is closer to an NICU ward at the hospital: blazing technology furiously working to sustain premature life.
That fresh apple you bite into has typically been sitting in dormancy for close to a year.
Within the right conditions, suppressing ethylene keeps fruit in a suspended state of development.
It is a lifestyle that pounds home the reality that liberty and freedom are deeply related to loneliness and isolation.
We aren’t at a food conference. This is the hive mind of my condiment drawer, a gibbering id of anxiety and acquisition, responsible for all those decaying bottles in my fridge.
And so suddenly, on July 14, Bastille Day for some but National Hot Dog Day for those in the know,
we are maintaining a mortuary here at the fish counter—keeping all our skinned dead friends looking glam for the customer. We retrieve their corpses from the back, and then begin coaxing some semblance of “fresh” or “life” out of them.
fish mortician’s makeup
The ice in the case thaws out overnight, the edges thinning down like old teeth exposed by receding gums, and
The monkfish is atmosphere,
Essentially, I thought that since audits are so sketchy and hazy, and yet ethical claims are so important, I, neutral me, should try to act as an independent set of eyes. I could audit the auditors! If that strikes you as dubious to the point of deep stupidity, good for you, you are way ahead of me.
this chicken shit gives off ammonia gas so strong that the “live catch” handlers who go in to gather the chickens for slaughter have to apply cornstarch to their skin to prevent the ammonia from peeling the flesh off their bodies.)
the light is caught by those tens of thousands of pig eyes. They glitter like holy orbs in the dark.
And So, Caked in the Odor of Pig Shit Made Physical on My Skin I Meet Kevin in West Hollywood for Lunch
third-party certification does not exist to solve a problem in the world, but to solve one inside of me. Their primary purpose is not to make the world a better place. It is to make the grocery store a safer place for me to shop. They lower my barriers to buy by promising me two things I crave: a sense of control and a sense of destiny.
commodities are rooted in fungibility, in an inherent similarity that allows them to be swapped interchangeably without thought or trade-off.
eschatological force in the trades,
