THAT TIME I WENT SUPERMARKET SWEEP ON 'EM
Our typical workday consists of norms: wake up, eat breakfast, shower (for most), arrive at work, nap at work, so on and so forth. Generally speaking, our after-work hours are filled with the same sort of habits: wake up from work nap, leave work, gym and/or bicep curls with grocery bags, dinner, TV and bed. My own weekends often consist of many of these midweek behaviors as well. Although I rarely do actual work on the weekends (sure, you can call me a Gen Y’er), I’d say roughly 95% of my M-F activities are present on my days off as well. Now although most of these habits are fine to be repeated, sometimes a little change can go a long way for your mental clarity and health. Well, as fate would have it, the food blogging angel pictured below must have known that my day-to-day was in need of a jolt. I doubt he intended said jolt to have such an effect on me, but I’m appreciative all the same.
- Truly the master of mega food disaster and the man of the hour, Mr. Ed Southern, General Manager of the Carytown Kroger in Richmond, VA.
During my typical Sunday Kroger run a couple weeks ago, I came face to face – literally – with one of these system shakeups. I knew something was different from the moment I walked through the door and into the produce section. Aside from being my first and most frequented section, this area holds the distinction of amping me the hell up for what’s sure to be an hour of grocery shopping. If they have fresh kale and slightly green bananas, you might as well color me pleased. Anyway, that’s not what this is about, so I’ll stop blabbing and get to the point. On this particular day the aisles weren’t just filled with a wide variety of fruits and veggies; they were filled with a wide variety of fruits, veggies AND people. And not just any people, like the dads rocking sweatpants while picking up the evening’s dinner. No, these people were selling stuff. And not just random things that nobody at a grocery store wants, like flip-phone chargers or their overeaten and underfed bodies (although that would be hilarious); they were selling foods that they had made.
As I kept winding my cart through the store, I happened upon supplier after supplier of locally made, locally sourced foods being sold by the people that sprouted, cared for, packaged, canned and transported them. I could have sworn that all food was flown in by Anikan Skywalker on a Back to the Future hover board or that Tony the Tiger delivered everyone’s cereal on his way to the jungle. But here they were, the spoilers of my futuristic food fantasies, asking me if I’d like to sample their coffee, kale chips, freshly baked breads and homemade pickles. It turns out that real people make our food. Holy kale chips…who would have known?
As I kept winding my cart through the store, I happened upon supplier after supplier of locally made, locally sourced foods being sold by the people that sprouted, cared for, packaged, canned and transported them. I could have sworn that all food was flown in by Anikan Skywalker on a Back to the Future hover board or that Tony the Tiger delivered everyone’s cereal on his way to the jungle. But here they were, the spoilers of my futuristic food fantasies, asking me if I’d like to sample their coffee, kale chips, freshly baked breads and homemade pickles. It turns out that real people make our food. Holy kale chips…who would have known?
- A short intro to my latest post about grocery store adventures.
At this point, I have to come clean with the facts before going into much more detail. It wasn’t on my first pass through the store that I realized how golden this opportunity really was. In fact, I actually completed my shopping, passing many of the aforementioned vendors in doing so, paid for my items, and drove to the edge of the store’s parking lot before realizing that I was an idiot. I had just witnessed something for the first time in my entire buggy-pushing life. Never before in the history of frozen pizza and talking juice boxes have I walked into a grocery store where I met a collection of people that made my food. Never. Was I seriously going to pass up the opportunity to talk to these alien lifeforms of food creation just to get back to my ho-hum Sunday afternoon? With that epiphany in mind, I turned my car around – which, mind you, is full of groceries since I just left the damn store – parked, and waltzed my happy ass back into Kroger. This time I had my camera in hand instead of a shopping cart. Think about it for a second - how many times in recent memory or, for that matter, your most distant memory, can you recall a similar occurrence? If you’re like me, then no recollection rises to the surface. Isn’t that odd? Food comes from oxygen-breathing, blood-pumping, occasionally strange-smelling people, right? Yet, in an average trip to a store, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single purveyor of those foods. Furthermore, doesn’t it strike you as odd/a little depressing that the grocery store, the place where nearly all of us shop for our sustenance, maintains this moat of mystery between the consumer and the people that are supposed to be sourcing that sustenance? The reality is that most grocery stores (aka, 99.95% of them) are pumping that moat larger and larger for one reason and one reason alone: dolla dolla bills, y’all. But take special note that it isn’t just the grocery stores alone that deserve blame; it is also very much the end result of a gigantic push from the mega food suppliers that stock their shelves.
- If you're in a pickle...or just want to taste a really delicious one, check out Chef Chaz Robinson from Sweet Sour Salty. He is 100% my pickle guy.
- Some pretty lady (forgive me, I missed her name) and the Billy from Billy Bread pose with a crowd of happy bread and cookie lovers.
Foods from Stouffer’s, Nestlé, Breyer’s, Oscar Meyer, General Mills, etc. all have something in common that local food purveyors cannot, and most likely do not want to, compete with. That cohesive factor is predictability. To these aforementioned food giants, predictability translates into effective price modeling tools, more accurate forecasting, and ultimately bigger numbers on their financial statements – yes, a very valuable quality for a publicly traded company that cares A LOT about profits. This predictability enables them the control to keep their product suppliers (namely huge agro complexes, distribution networks and major grocery stores) under the iron thumb of supply and demand. When push comes to shove and one of these major players sees a dip in sales, they intentionally insulate themselves from these cold periods by passing on pricing pressure to those same suppliers and distributors. How ironic, considering a lot of their food can be found in the frozen foods section.
APPROXIMATE CALCULATION OF LIFETIME GROCERY STORE VISITS
0.8 times per week (I’m always hungry) * 52 weeks in a year * 26 years in my life = 1081.6 visits
NUMBER OF TIMES THIS HAS HAPPENED
1 time…ever
PROBABILITY OF THIS HAPPENING AGAIN
1/1081.6 = .09245% repeating of course
0.8 times per week (I’m always hungry) * 52 weeks in a year * 26 years in my life = 1081.6 visits
NUMBER OF TIMES THIS HAS HAPPENED
1 time…ever
PROBABILITY OF THIS HAPPENING AGAIN
1/1081.6 = .09245% repeating of course
- Doug Gammon and son from Sun Seasoned Raw Foods had the whole party screaming our favorite shopping day cheer: KALE YEA!
- I didn't really need the caffeine since I was stoked beyond belief during this particular trip to Kroger. However, were the need for midday (natural) speed to have struck, Stephen from Blanchard's Coffee had my back.
From the small food business owner’s point of view, this predictability is something that they simply cannot compete with. Aside from being held subject to the previously described price pressures, nearly all of these small businesses hold true to the value of high quality – a trait replaced long ago with greed by the big boys. Don’t mistake what I’m saying: large corporations also have very high quality standards by which they operate. The million (gazillion?) pound difference is that smaller mom-and-pop shops tend to emphasize the quality of nourishment that their foods provide to the eater, not simply the visual integrity and/or lack of insects onboard the initial supply they receive. There are many reasons for this. One of the most powerful reasons also happens to be the single biggest advantage of buying from the little guy: better health for the consumer. Building upon the first, an additional reason is the level of transparency/vulnerability that’s present when vendor X sells to patron Y with no middle man present.
I looked into the eyes of each of these people as they passed their artisanal breads, spiced coffees, sage and garlic sausages, AWESOME cakes and barrage of pickled goods from their hands to mine. There exists an inexplicable level of connection and symbiosis with such a trade. Primitively stated, there is a little something called trust that is silent partner to such an exchange. I know it sounds nostalgic, but I think the fact that we brush this intimacy off as though it never existed is a sign of our numbness to the woes of our current food system. In days past, a store owner knew the names of those people that shopped in his store, shook their hands, kept their tabs on a burlap sack, watched the children of their customers grow into healthy, happy adults, and eventually become loyal customers themselves. In the modern system that way is no more. There is no accountability between the corporations that sell you the food that you purchase. I think that’s the biggest takeaway from my recent Kroger trip. Having a real-life encounter with someone who had labored to create, package and deliver the food that I was eating felt totally foreign, and that, in turn, felt totally wrong.
I looked into the eyes of each of these people as they passed their artisanal breads, spiced coffees, sage and garlic sausages, AWESOME cakes and barrage of pickled goods from their hands to mine. There exists an inexplicable level of connection and symbiosis with such a trade. Primitively stated, there is a little something called trust that is silent partner to such an exchange. I know it sounds nostalgic, but I think the fact that we brush this intimacy off as though it never existed is a sign of our numbness to the woes of our current food system. In days past, a store owner knew the names of those people that shopped in his store, shook their hands, kept their tabs on a burlap sack, watched the children of their customers grow into healthy, happy adults, and eventually become loyal customers themselves. In the modern system that way is no more. There is no accountability between the corporations that sell you the food that you purchase. I think that’s the biggest takeaway from my recent Kroger trip. Having a real-life encounter with someone who had labored to create, package and deliver the food that I was eating felt totally foreign, and that, in turn, felt totally wrong.
- I'm just glad it wasn't my wiener. But really, Brad from Sausage Craft is piecing together some ridiculous concoctions inside a pork casing. Strangely enough, they ALL taste awesome.
- This unknown guy and gal pair from Bold Rock Cider were dishing out some seriously yummy, extremely low calorie/low sugar cocktails. Talk about the perfect ending to the perfect shopping trip.
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