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| (Not in Pullman's Safeway) |
Recently I visited the Pullman Safeway. I had a list in my
hand, and I was shopping as a college student who was stable financially, but
not by any means wealthy. When I started to evaluate the store from that
perspective, I realized a lot of things were aimed at me. But that goes to
figure; a college town store aiming products to sell to college kids. I saw
beer in a huge display with football promotions first thing through the doors.
College students plus football on the weekends equals beer consumption. On the
ends of the aisles was cheap, convenient and easily prepared food. Part time
job salary minus books minus beer money equals very little for anything other than
‘Easy Mac’ and ‘Top Ramen.’ Along with the ‘Easy Mac’ on the ends of the
aisles, there were also chips and salsa, crackers and coffee. Granted, not
everything needed in one’s life, but just about everything for a good weekend
of watching football and partying.
It almost seemed to be that the store wanted to make
shopping quick and easy for college students, make the simple things to make
easy to see and—seemingly—always on sale. Other necessities were right where
they always are—the outside edge. Bread milk and eggs are always easy to find. The image at the right pretty well sums it all up. A generic floor plan for a grocery store, and where "real" food may or may not be found.
When I went back even more recently, I had a list in my
hand. I considered this list to be like a restricted diet, that I needed to
find specific things, and substitutes would have to be considered very
carefully. I found that my time in the store increased, and that, minus the
products on the walls of the store, everything I needed was within the aisles.
I was hunting for certain things rather than wandering up and down the rows and
deciding what I thought I could cook or use or eat that night. I can see that
if my list had actual diet restrictions rather than just product restrictions,
my challenges would have been greater. In the main view of the aisles the cheap
food is easily seen, but the organic products are often lower and towards the
ends of the aisles.
The average shopper will see the mainstream products the
most; products which, behind the label, have mostly the same processor and
producer. This relates to the idea we have been discussing, the illusion of choice.
How can we consider multiple brands of chips choice when the same company owns
all the brands? Few companies buy from a huge number of farmers, and turn those
commodities into a wide range of predetermined products marketed to specific
consumer groups. But it has turned into a situation where now, as consumers, we
are accustomed to seeing those products on our store shelves, so when they aren’t
there, what do we do? We demand them, we hunt for them, and in some cases, pay
way too much money for them (not so much in the highly processed and cheap
foods, however). All that does is trickle back upstream to those bottleneck
corporations and tells them that we want
those products on the shelves. So they keep supplying them.
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| All these foods contain corn. |
Consumer shaping—is what I am calling it—is the best way to
describe how consumers are connected to the food chain. We are shaped by the
system to demand, use, and even need certain goods, and therefore raw
commodities, ie. corn. Our choices have been shaped by the middle men between
the farmer and us. The products supplied to us have worked into our daily lives
to a point where we go straight to the same box or bag every time in the store
without thinking about it. We have been molded by the choices in the grocery
store, and our lives have been both facilitated that, and been impacted by
that.
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| Oxbow is a CSA right here in WA that has taken off in the past 8 years. |
The great thing, now is that there is a big push back from
this system. Organic, local, sustainable. This movement will never be able to
take over the entire food system, but for those who can participate and benefit
from it, it is a much welcomed change and release from the control of giant
corporations. We will always need cheap food, and we will always need corn,
soy, wheat, beef, and many other products to feed people around the world. But
the recent movements around the US show that people want to be more aware of
their food and where it comes from. “Eaten today? Hug a farmer.”
