Supermarket! Behold!
Inside the sanctuary of satiety
Brendan Christopher Cathcart, Staff
The supermarket: the glorious triumph of the human species over the struggle for survival. That may seem a bit of a grandiose invocation for what most people see as a banal food factory that we have no choice but to go to, but the supermarket really is an astounding achievement of dominance over the natural environment, organization of massive amounts of resources both food and human, and efficiency clocking in at the speed of money.
Growing up baby boomer or later, the supermarket seems like an institution that has always been there, like cell division, volcanoes, or the ocean. This, of course, is anachronistic in the same sense that in present-day Canada it’s nearly impossible to imagine that our world could even exist without television, cars, and liberal universities. But it can, and did, for an extremely long period of time while humans were learning to walk upright. Homo sapiens emerged 400,000 years ago, agriculture 12,000 years ago, and the first self-serve grocery store 91 years ago; a Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tenn..
Eating through our heritage
In a 2002 issue of Proceedings of the Nutritional Society, professor Stanley J. Ulijaszek, from the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford, highlights some of the key characteristics of the modern human diet in his article “Human eating behaviour in an evolutionary ecological context”: “Present-day eating behaviour in industrialized society,” he says, “is characterized by the consumption of high-energy-density diets and often unstructured feeding patterns, largely uncoupled from seasonal cycles of food availability.” Basically what he’s saying is that we eat lots, whenever we feel like it, and we don’t have to worry about not being able to get the specific things we want all year-round.
Being able to get foods without regard to season is a relatively new phenomenon that people in industrialized societies tend not to think about. However, if there were no supermarket and global food economy, then, as an example, the average household in Canada would only be able to get fresh tomatoes for a few months of the year and then have to suffer three seasons of canned or none at all. For those who can’t live without the plump and juicy sweetness of fresh tomatoes this is a scenario too painful to contemplate. Just be sure not to share such privileged existential anguish with your grandparents; they may just slap you across the face and tell you again what it was like when the potato harvest failed back on the farm in Russia and their siblings died because of it.
Andrew Seth and Geoffrey Randall explain in their book Supermarket Wars how this seamless phenomenon of year-round produce is actually accomplished: “Outside a few favoured climate zones, most fresh produce has seasons — but in a modern supermarket, almost everything is on the shelves 12 months a year. Buyers follow supply round the world, so fruit and vegetables may come from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, South or Central America, and so on.” Come to think of it . . . there, I’m back. It’s late November and I just popped into my kitchen for a couple almonds and freshly cut pineapple. Fantastic.
Tracing the development of human eating behaviour from pre-history to history to present-day, Ulijaszek notes two decisive advantages with which our intellect and physical makeup have privileged us. “There are two features of human eating behaviour that are not shared with animals on any appreciable scale,” he says, “these features being the complex control of food availability and the maintenance of complex social and cultural norms of diet and eating.”
Going to the supermarket is more than just a chore; it also demonstrates an interesting fact about our position in the food chain. We are not only at the top. In many practical ways we are in control of it. A lion in the Sahara that has no natural predators and can kill just about anything is still subject to potential fluctuations in prey population — no more antelope equals no more lion. It’s a slightly different story for humans. Because humans are omnivorous and have developed technologies like agriculture, domestication, breeding, medicine, genetic manipulation, transportation and refrigeration, we can “destroy” 10 million cows and chickens that have potential diseases like mad cow disease or the avian flu and still be fine.
Anne Kingston, author of The Edible Man: Dave Nichol, President’s Choice, and the Making of Popular Taste, says that there’s much more to be discovered about our civilization in the aisles of a supermarket. “The careful observer can still catch sight of primitive lessons passed on through time,” she says. “There, one can appreciate the necessity that found the meat inside a walnut’s shell; the imagination that thought to harness oil from the olive; and the inspiration that produced the miracle of bread. There are also reminders of other core ethics of Western society, a primary one being the fact that it is acceptable to take the life of another animal in order to sustain one’s own. The supermarket is also a showcase of more recent technological marvels that duplicate the formation of ice crystals and create unpronounceable chemicals that serve as life support for artificial food.”
The modern supermarket is such a recent marvel of mankind, notes Kingston, that in 1957 Queen Elizabeth requested a tour of one on a visit to the United States, followed two years later by the same request from Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, who called it “the monument to American prosperity and free-market ideology.”
The makeup of today’s markets
So what does this great monument to man the miraculous actually look like? It sounds like it should be adorned with gold, with paintings of fertility goddesses on the walls, and ruby-encrusted fountains of pure white milk in the aisles. But no, not even close. The actual experience of a supermarket is neither one of blissful security nor of ecstatic communion with the spirits of our ancestors that got us where we are today. Why? Because, says Kingston, “It’s a cutthroat business with profit margins after taxes between 0.5 per cent and two per cent.”
The primary concern for a CEO of a supermarket is to get as many people into the store as fast as possible and then to get them to leave a maximum amount of money behind them on the way out. “Bring in the customers or die out” is both the ethos and obsession of every high-powered food jockey. Kingston says that at one point Dave Nichol, founder of the Real Canadian Superstore, actually had a supermarket aisle set up in his office so that he could better contemplate the metaphysics of “The Shelf.” Who would have guessed that philosophical speculation was used to sell No Name brand peas?
What is “The Shelf”?
The supermarket shelf is an aluminum phantasm, simultaneously visible and invisible. A customer has to see the specific food the store has selected for them to choose from, think that it’s in absolutely endless supply, realize just how much they need it, and believe they’re getting it at the only reasonable price. Conversely, the customer needs to be blind to the marketing strategy, the sales techniques, the trust and confidence they’ve placed in the store, and the intensely ruthless competition that has put thousand upon thousands of small businesses out of work. It all needs to be seamless. And it is, so much so that the massive amount of time spent in a supermarket during a lifetime is generally forgotten the moment a person exits the store.
The amount of time spent buying groceries is hardly ever calculated by the shopper, but to be sure, this is a daily calculation made by those in the industry. Kingston says don’t be fooled, “The supermarket shopper is one of the most closely observed species alive.” There’s far too much money at stake to leave it to chance. They want to know when you’re there, how much time per visit, where you spend your time in store, how often you come, and how long you’ve been coming.
Market analysts Andrew Seth and Geoffrey Randall reveal the results of the depressing calculation in the book Supermarket Wars: Global Strategies for Food Retailers. “The average adult will spend about two per cent of their life in a supermarket: we cannot escape their influence, for good or bad.” The number two sounds negligible when it’s stated as a per cent but when it’s transformed into its equivalent — days in the life of an adult (age 18-80) — it becomes 452.6 days. And in its even more soul-crushing format — 10,862 hours. That’s double the time it would take for a person to complete a four-year degree, studying eight hours a day, 22 days a month, eight months a year, no Christmas or spring break.
There are many reasons why people would pull double-degrees for groceries. First, food is necessary. Second, the buildings are designed like labyrinths. Third, the average supermarket contains 25,000–30,000 items. And fourth, foraging instinct coupled with both a frugal sensibility and the current supermarket state of perpetual sale assures the shopper that there is always a deal to be found if you just look hard enough.
As much as supermarkets are a profound demonstration of the evolved human capability to both control food availability on a massive, world-changing scale and to maintain complex socio-cultural norms of diet and eating, they are themselves evolving as institutions. Every year they get bigger, more organized, and more efficient. They work to refine and re-refine advertising, marketing, and sales techniques to get more customers and more money. They consolidate power across global markets, fighting tooth-and-nail with their competition, changing worldwide standards of agriculture, production, and trade to guarantee a never-ending supply that laughs in the face of seasons, all for the best price.
Triumph of human capability, yes, although it might be a good idea to keep your eyes peeled next visit to the supermarket to avoid becoming the next piece of food in its highly efficient system.
