The end of food

Near the end of a busy work day yesterday, my wife and I struck a deal. She would round up all of the children from their camps and daycare settings, and I would forage for dinner. Sweet deal for me, I thought. I was being rewarded for having done ALL of the taxiing the previous day, I thought (so much, so far, for my resolution to walk or bike to work. Until I find some way to strap more kids to my body, I'm stuck in the big-ass big-gas minivan). The time was short, so I decided to take a short cut, visit a big city grocery store at the end of a wide, fast four lane roadway. It was somewhat in the wrong direction, but I estimated I'd make up the time by speeding home, just like everyone else seems to do in this city. I forgave myself the slip in values with barely an om mane padme hum. I had hungry children at home. Huge mistake. From the moment the automatic doors sprang open, admitting me into the cool, wide aisles filled with gaudy rectangles of edible products, I felt a cloud forming above my head. The thing is, large grocery store chains have little to do with food and much more to do with speed, lifestyle, survival, and marketing. The spectacle I saw before me consisted of a sea of anxious, harried and hungry parents, rushing in from work to grab something edible that they could get home and get on the table within ten minutes. The products I saw on the shelves had little to do with food and much more to do with organic chemistry. I tried to take respite in the produce section among food I'd be able to recognize, but though the shapes seemed right, the colours were off and the textures were wrong. Tomatoes were too hard to be that red. "Organic" broccoli was tightly shrink-wrapped in about fifty layers of plastic, so it was hard to see what it really looked like. I fled to the natural foods section, buried near the back of the store among lawn chairs and massive shrines to the backyard barbecue consisting of flatbed trucks full of weiners and avalanches of frightening yellow mustard. In natural foods, I found a small bottle of expeller pressed oil, some decent looking tofu and, surprise, a good substantial soy sauce reduced to clear at 99 cents. Combined with my cellulose vegetable products, I had the makings of a decent little stirfry. I cashed out. The soy sauce didn't scan on the laser beam checkout thingie, so a young fellow with multiple facial piercings was sent off to find the price. Nobody bothered to ask me until the cashier and I had been standing and waiting for his return for about five minutes, a long lineup of angry looking young mothers tapping their toes behind me. "It's ninety-nine cents," I said. The cashier nodded. When the others in line realized they were being held up by a one dollar bottle of sauce, the frequency of toe clicking increased menacingly. He finally returned, flicked the bottle along the conveyer belt and muttered "buck ninety-nine." I shook my head. My bet was that he never found the shelf and so made up something plausible. My bet was that he didn't even know there was a natural foods section. You really have to push to squeeze past all that mustard. "Ninety-nine cents," I said, "reduced to clear." He shrugged his shoulders. "Ninety-nine cents, then." He didn't know. He didn't care. Neither did any of the people behind me in line, waiting to pay for their overpriced boxes of microwaveable food. They didn't know what they were buying. They didn't know what they were eating. They didn't care. They just wanted to get back behind the wheels of their large automobiles and drive back to their air-conditioned great rooms. I wasn't hungry anymore.

There's a huge obesity problem in North America. Some people say it's because we like food too much. I think it's because we don't like food enough.