When I made a
menu for this imaginary family, I based it off of my preferences and my
family’s preferences. This meant a lot of fresh foods and a lot of whole foods
such as fruits, vegetables, and grains like quinoa and rice. Going through
these foods, I was surprised to notice how many options there really were. I
had never stopped to notice that there were maybe twenty options for how to buy
lettuce – loose, in a variety of sorts (romaine, iceberg, butterhead, etc.),
and packaged in bags and plastic boxes. How many different types of bagged
lettuce could possibly exist? And why were potatoes located in two different
places about 15 feet away from each other? Why were there carrots in two
different spots, separated by about 20 feet? Baby carrots sitting next to whole
carrots in one section, more baby carrots in another section, more whole
carrots elsewhere. Organic carrots separated from other organic carrots. To the
average shopper (me) there doesn’t really seem to be any rhyme or reason. But,
after reading Nestle, I am sure that there is a very precise logic to what
carrots get placed where. Perhaps whole organic carrots are placed next to
non-organic baby carrots because both are more expensive options (one because
they’re organic and the other because they’ve been processed and are more
convenient). Now, as an average shopper, I walk through Tops, notice these
carrots, make my choice between the two not realizing that there are other
carrot options lurking not far away, and end up buying whatever it was that the
store wanted me to buy. This separating of carrots (and other foods) also makes
it difficult to compare prices. Or, having already picked up some carrots, I
may not bother to compare prices once I come upon the other ones, not wanting
to spend time putting back the ones I already chose.
I discovered
this strange separation with other foods as well. I found black beans in three
different places throughout the store, salsa all over the place, quinoa in two
different sections, organic peanut butter and all-natural peanut but segregated
from the other peanut butter in a natural foods section, and pasta in two
different places along a very lengthy aisle. Milk was both at the front of the
store and the back of the store. Rice, like the peanut butter, was separated by
organic and non-organic in two very different sections of the grocery store.
Likely, the store has figured out what types of people will frequent what parts
of the store and will place particular varieties of items there to appeal to
those customers. Black beans that advertised no added salt and being non GMO
were placed very close to the natural foods section, and the organic quinoa was
placed amongst the fruits and vegetables, while other quinoa was placed
elsewhere in the store.
I was also
interested in the fact that, for certain foods, it was almost impossible to
find a food with all real-food ingredients. The biggest issue for this was with
bready products – sandwich bread, buns, and cereal. These foods almost
invariably had long lists of unpronounceable ingredients. Bread can be made without 30 ingredients, so
why didn’t Tops carry any of that bread? (Or maybe I just couldn’t find it,
considering that they separate all of their foods throughout the store, making
it impossible to find everything.)
One other
notable thing was that many packages were designed to make customers think
about the natural ingredients of the food. Whether this was by stating that the
ingredients were all-natural and GMO free, saying the food was organic, showing
pictures of the whole ingredients put into the processed foods, showing
pictures of farmers and farms, or labeling the food as “old-fashioned,” the
vast majority of products were giving the image of “real food,” even when they
contained many non-food ingredients, such as the DiGiorno pizza, which touted
being made with 100 percent real cheese. Even the children’s cereal advertised
being made with real fruit flavoring, even while it advertised to children with
fun cartoon images. Most of the food in the grocery store is still processed
and engineered to some extent, but the packaging feeds into consumers’ desires
to believe that that food is actually natural, wholesome, and good. Meanwhile,
these foods often had a lot of sodium hidden in them (one variety of canned
beans had 400 mg of sodium per serving and the all-natural pizza had 670 mg per
serving). And, as Pollan noted, most foods that have health claims on them are
the ones that actually aren’t healthy. For instance, one jelly that I looked
at, which claimed having no sugar, instead had all sorts of engineered
non-foods in it, most of them derived from corn.
Finally, I was
surprised by how much of the food I found was sourced from the United States. A
lot of the vegetables were from California, of course, but much of the
processed food was also from the United States. This did seem a little
misleading, though, because most packages simply gave information for where the
company was located. For something like bread, which had a huge list of
ingredients, wasn’t produced all in one place. Certainly those ingredients were
sourced from all over, but none of that information was given on the package.
How much food was actually from outside of the United States, but I couldn’t
tell because only one location was given for each food? It was also interesting
to see that many of the foods, particularly produce, were prominently
advertised as being products of the United States. In the Hjelmar article, many
residents in Denmark were more interested in food being grown in Denmark than
being strictly local, as were participants in the study by Bellows et al., so
it seems that companies might try to advertise this clearly to appeal to
consumers.
Overall, I
definitely felt what Nestle describes in having both unlimited choice and no
choice. I found myself favoring products with packaging that made me think of
farms. I discovered uncountable options for produce, pizza, and bread, yet,
based on store placement, I did not encounter all of those options. Prices were
confusing to interpret without a scale, and I could not figure out how much of
some items I would need. There was too much information in some places, not
enough in others. The processed foods were overwhelming – which ones were okay,
and which ones weren’t? At the end of it all, I felt exhausted. Better to stick
with the farmers’ market or the Market House, I thought, where I can mindlessly
feel good about everything I buy. Or can I?
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