Look On Aisle 5

Have you ever stopped to calculate how much time you spend in
each section of the supermarket?

Apart from the non-food areas of drug store supplies, rubber
goods, and diapers, most stores have about 10 distinct food
areas: produce, dairy, meat, ethnic foods and pasta, canned
foods, prepared foods, drinks, frozen foods, snacks, and deli.

The areas where most of our intake should focus, if we are
watching our weight and our health, are always on the edges,
against the wall: produce, meat, dairy. We can easily navigate
through 80 or 90 percent of the store without bumping into them.

Next week, I’ll get vegetables, we promise, as we wade into the
packaged and frozen foods that fit so much more neatly into our
time-starved, rat-race lives. It is so much less time and
trouble to microwave a plate than slow simmer or steam
something, plus there’s all that cutting and chopping time we
just can’t spare.

The frozen stuff doesn’t taste as good but luckily the
manufacturers figured that out and added butter sauce or cheese
sauce to give it more flavor, a few nuts or other crispy
additions to add some snap – nothing is plain any more.

We stock up on packages loaded with chemicals we can’t even
pronounce. We pick up bags of quick snacks with nary a nutrient
in the bunch. We throw fluffy breads and crackers into our cart,
knowing they are merely edible plates.

Ten years ago, I lived in a Korean neighborhood. I couldn’t read
half of the market’s signs and ingredients but shopped there
anyway because of the atmosphere, dominated by an enormous
variety of produce that took up at least half the store’s space.
Trying totally new, strange-looking roots and fruits was
exciting: sometimes marvelous, occasionally vile.

We have taken our markets into the age of the superstores where
everything is available but nothing is natural. What are we
doing to our poor bodies? We feed them junk and then spend a
fortune on trying to acquire the “natural” look. Fat chance (pun
intentional)!

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