Supermarket Culture Shock

Supermarket Culture Shock

(c) Dorine Houston 2008, all rights reserved 

"Honey!  What's wrong?" 

I propped myself against the fender of the yellow Chevette and dry heaved over the curb.  Stuart jumped out of the car and held my shoulders.  It was so long since a small lunch that nothing came up and I began to settle down. 

I wrapped my arms around his neck and then started to feel foolish.  After all, I had been born and raised in the US and had seen supermarkets since infancy.  However, I had come of age in Spain and had spent several years buying my food in traditional markets where individual vendors gathered to offer their wares.  Greengrocers piled heaps of fruits and vegetables on their boards.  I could pick a particularly pretty orange or cherimoya for myself or ask the vendor to put half a kilo of flat Mediterranean green beans into a cone made of newspaper for me. 

Butchers stood behind glass and enamel display cases.  Half cows, hogs and other animals, skinned and with heads intact, hung from hooks coming down from the ceiling behind them, just waiting for my specific cutting order if none of the filets and chops lying on ceramic platters in the display case appealed.  None of the meat was brilliantly red.  Fish and seafood lay whole and freshly caught on trays of chipped ice in front of the fishmongers.  Crunchy-crusted loaves of baguette type bread lay on shelves, not wrapped so as not to lose their crispness outside and tenderness inside, waiting to be dropped into my endlessly expanding string bag. 

But an old friend had pursued me across the ocean and had convinced me to fall in love with him, to return to Philadelphia after all these years and marry him.  A choice I can never regret--other than that his heart suddenly gave out shortly before we were to celebrate our 29th anniversary. 

Getting culture shock when you go to spend a substantial amount of time actually living in another country rather than merely visiting is not a surprise to most people.  They expect to react to the unfamiliar and to struggle to cope with the differences in social signals.  However, anybody who lives in a foreign country for more than a year and makes a decent effort acculturates, gets used to and familiar with the differences and even embraces them.  Well-adjusted people do that. 

What so many do not expect is the re-entry shock that occurs upon their return to their native country.  Culture shock?  You were born and raised there!  However, during the years one is gone, the culture keeps on developing, unnoticed to everybody living there but perceptible and strange to a person returning and expecting nothing to have changed.  Things embraced in the new culture cause a person to forget their different counterparts in the natal culture.  Spend a few friendly years of going into a tiny neighborhood dry goods and standing at the counter to chat with the proprietor and other shoppers before asking for a tube of toothpaste or bottle of aspirin to be gotten for you off one of the shelves behind the counter.  You drop your purchase into your string bag and enjoy the exchange of social strokes as much as you value shopping for your needs.  Being thrust into a monster the size of two football fields and lighted far too brightly with nobody to tell you how to find a toothbrush in all that sheer stuff and far too many choices is nerve-wracking, even to an American returning after a few years of not seeing anything that size or dealing with so very many choices.  Eyes hurt in all that excess of fluorescent lighting as well.  The utter impersonalness of the whole thing is painfully disconcerting. 

It was my first visit to a US supermarket in several years, and I was going to prepare dinner for Stuart for the first time in the US.  Urban supermarkets, unlike their considerably larger suburban counterparts, often have no parking lots at all; most customers arrive walking or by bus.  My then-fiance's job required him to have a car at the time; he drove me to the supermarket after picking me up from another more distant place.  He was going to sit in the car while I shopped since leaving it at the curb would net a ticket and possibly towing. 

I started with the produce, looking for the ingredients for our salad, side vegetables and fruit dessert.  Everything looked strangely artificial and inedible.  Even something as simple as a green pepper was set on Styrofoam and shrink-wrapped.  Can a human being actually eat such fake-looking stuff masquerading as food?  How do you smell the food for ripeness?  Moving on to the meat, I found the beef an artificial psychedelic shade of red, again, set on Styrofoam and wrapped in plastic.  Surely this wasn't real meat!  There was no butcher in sight to talk with me about this meat, either, nor greengrocer with whom to chat about vegetables and fruit, or even exchange the most minimally expected social pleasantries.  The fish were likewise plattered and wrapped; their heads were gone so their eyes and gills could not be examined for freshness. 

This could not possibly be food, I thought, as queasiness overcame me.  I abandoned the grocery cart and fled, 

Fortunately, Stuart had spent a month with me in Spain and had gone to market with me; he knew the contrast that had shocked me so deeply. 

This was in 1976.  Since then, many supermarkets have cut back on the shrink wrapping, and display whole fish you can buy as is or have cleaned to spec.  On the other hand, industrial farming has added genetic modification to plant production and intensifying use of pesticides can only be doing us further harm.  The sheer number of manipulated food-imitating substances in boxes, cans and other kinds of packages has increased exponentially.  So have the unpronounceables on the ingredients lists, and the use of such known dangers as high fructose corn syrup.  Even cheese containing fillers or outright manufactured from chemicals shares valuable space with real dairy. 

The lying has increased.  Have you seen the recent General Mills commercial touting the whole grains in all its breakfast cereals?  It names a few whole grain cereals, ending the list with…Captain Crunch!  That dreadful box of candy lumps and hydrogenated oils pretending to be good for children!  

Daphne Miller, M. D. urges us to return to the diets of our ancestors in _The Jungle Effect_.  She claims that such menu choices would restore us to the good health and vitality of former ages--and of members of communities where ancestral foods are still eaten.  The food she describes is either wild or produced on small family farms, not on agribusiness spreads.  Although she claims to have found local produce in supermarkets, I can show her many where such a thing has never darkened their doors.  I propose that we abandon supermarkets for farmers markets and CSA memberships.  I propose that we reject cheap mass-produced meat in favor of free range and organic meat from small local farmers, and that we eat less of it to make up for the cost.  Our arteries will rejoice, as Miller herself points out. 

Thirty-two years later, I no longer get nauseous at the sight of shrink-wrapped food; after all, being well adjusted requires getting over that sort of initial response!  However, I still like to take my CSA boxes five months of the year and seek out local, seasonal food even in February.  Around here, that means eating a lot of cabbage, turnips and apples!  I love finding exotic produce, and adore tropical fruits, but am wondering if it is time to rethink eating mangoes and starfruit.  There is no way they have been locally grown.