Feeding Myself In Kansas
Nov. 14th, 2011 12:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteI went shopping for food at a store called Aidi. I have now shopped at enough stores in Kansas to reveal a pattern. The easiest way I can describe the pattern is by saying, "I have been totally spoiled by living in California."
To me, many supermarkets in Kansas are have an atmosphere of resignation and sickness. Everything is jarred, canned, or wrapped in plastic, and most things are either frozen solid or have a suspiciously long shelf-life. There is absolutely no such thing as a fresh vegetable in these Kansas supermarkets. The closest I have found was vacuum-packed unwashed lettuce, and when I read the labeling I discovered that it had been trucked out from Salinas, CA. The only thing that stands a chance of being fresh is the beef, and that depends on where you shop. You will not find the word "organic" used on any label anywhere. I think it's actually a curse-word in this part of the country, like "democrat" or "Colbert".
Today I examined every shelf of the Aidi market twice, in search of something I could eat that wouldn't just widen the nutritional crater that Kansas is digging inside my body. I found a bag of tiny "Ocean Spray" oranges that had been shipped from Chile, coated with wax and sprayed with thiabendazole, and the vacuum-packed lettuce from Salinas. I opened the lettuce in my motel room and carefully washed it in the sink, and that is how I am enjoying my first real salad in two weeks.
Actually, "supermarket" is the wrong word to use for these places. A more accurate description would be something like "junk-food warehouse and butcher's shop". More than half of Aidi's floorspace is taken up with pancreas-destroying sugar snacks and bleached-flour milk-chocolate crap. You could eat a different "food" from this section for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for a hundred days... But by the end of the first month you'd probably be dead. Sure, there are stores like this in California. But in Kansas, in many small towns, this is all you get. When you are planning your meals for the week, for yourself and your kids, this is what you work with.
Walking around here, I tried to imagine what it would be like if I was a local, with limited travel range, trying to improve my eating habits. Would I have the knowledge to categorically dismiss so many of the things in this store as harmful? Would I have the guts to, since it runs counter to the eating habits of my friends and family? The only things we could all agree on would be meat and perhaps a few of the dairy products, and even then we'd have to argue about quantity. Assuming I made enough money to choose where to eat, how would I even be able to locate fresh vegetables? Decent oil? Eggs that didn't come from some tortured wastrel of a factory chicken? These things are just ... not here. At least, as far as I know. Perhaps it just takes some determined searching.
But compare this to where I come from. In Oakland, the supermarkets are loaded with produce. Then, for an appreciable number of residents, it's not of sufficient quality, so they shop at Whole Foods (and moan about the price - I know I have). But that's not enough either, because they also raise a stink about how far their food travels, and who owns and manages the outlet, so they have places like Berkeley Bowl and Rainbow Grocery. But that's not as direct as it could be - so Oakland itself has at least FOUR Farmer's Markets that assemble every week, rain or shine.
Back in Oakland, I live five blocks away from a store that ships gourmet chocolate from Europe and Africa, and I won't buy most of it because I'm not impressed with the flavor. Here in Topeka, if I want dark chocolate, I choose between the large bar that tastes like wax, and the small bar with the oily texture.
Is it really just geography causing this? California gets the fancy weather, so it gets the fancy food? Is it the farm bill? Is it just what people are willing to put up with - a cultural thing?
Some optimistic part of me wasn't expecting it to be true - but as I rove around these cities, I am lost in a sea of people "living and partly living", as T.S. Eliot would put it. Planted behind desks, browsing Facebook. Arguing about high-school football over dinner. Sitting inert in bars. Kicking around in back lots, doing nothing. How much of this is boiling up from their physiology? How much of this is happening because they don't feel right, in a way they can't explain, for a reason that would never occur to them - to most people? Everyone is too busy trying to get any kind of food at all.
Perhaps I'm taking this all to seriously. However, an hour ago I finished all the lettuce in the box - enough for three salads - and my stomach and intestines are feeling better than they have in weeks. My head feels clearer too.
To me, many supermarkets in Kansas are have an atmosphere of resignation and sickness. Everything is jarred, canned, or wrapped in plastic, and most things are either frozen solid or have a suspiciously long shelf-life. There is absolutely no such thing as a fresh vegetable in these Kansas supermarkets. The closest I have found was vacuum-packed unwashed lettuce, and when I read the labeling I discovered that it had been trucked out from Salinas, CA. The only thing that stands a chance of being fresh is the beef, and that depends on where you shop. You will not find the word "organic" used on any label anywhere. I think it's actually a curse-word in this part of the country, like "democrat" or "Colbert".
Today I examined every shelf of the Aidi market twice, in search of something I could eat that wouldn't just widen the nutritional crater that Kansas is digging inside my body. I found a bag of tiny "Ocean Spray" oranges that had been shipped from Chile, coated with wax and sprayed with thiabendazole, and the vacuum-packed lettuce from Salinas. I opened the lettuce in my motel room and carefully washed it in the sink, and that is how I am enjoying my first real salad in two weeks.
Actually, "supermarket" is the wrong word to use for these places. A more accurate description would be something like "junk-food warehouse and butcher's shop". More than half of Aidi's floorspace is taken up with pancreas-destroying sugar snacks and bleached-flour milk-chocolate crap. You could eat a different "food" from this section for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for a hundred days... But by the end of the first month you'd probably be dead. Sure, there are stores like this in California. But in Kansas, in many small towns, this is all you get. When you are planning your meals for the week, for yourself and your kids, this is what you work with.
Walking around here, I tried to imagine what it would be like if I was a local, with limited travel range, trying to improve my eating habits. Would I have the knowledge to categorically dismiss so many of the things in this store as harmful? Would I have the guts to, since it runs counter to the eating habits of my friends and family? The only things we could all agree on would be meat and perhaps a few of the dairy products, and even then we'd have to argue about quantity. Assuming I made enough money to choose where to eat, how would I even be able to locate fresh vegetables? Decent oil? Eggs that didn't come from some tortured wastrel of a factory chicken? These things are just ... not here. At least, as far as I know. Perhaps it just takes some determined searching.
But compare this to where I come from. In Oakland, the supermarkets are loaded with produce. Then, for an appreciable number of residents, it's not of sufficient quality, so they shop at Whole Foods (and moan about the price - I know I have). But that's not enough either, because they also raise a stink about how far their food travels, and who owns and manages the outlet, so they have places like Berkeley Bowl and Rainbow Grocery. But that's not as direct as it could be - so Oakland itself has at least FOUR Farmer's Markets that assemble every week, rain or shine.
Back in Oakland, I live five blocks away from a store that ships gourmet chocolate from Europe and Africa, and I won't buy most of it because I'm not impressed with the flavor. Here in Topeka, if I want dark chocolate, I choose between the large bar that tastes like wax, and the small bar with the oily texture.
Is it really just geography causing this? California gets the fancy weather, so it gets the fancy food? Is it the farm bill? Is it just what people are willing to put up with - a cultural thing?
Some optimistic part of me wasn't expecting it to be true - but as I rove around these cities, I am lost in a sea of people "living and partly living", as T.S. Eliot would put it. Planted behind desks, browsing Facebook. Arguing about high-school football over dinner. Sitting inert in bars. Kicking around in back lots, doing nothing. How much of this is boiling up from their physiology? How much of this is happening because they don't feel right, in a way they can't explain, for a reason that would never occur to them - to most people? Everyone is too busy trying to get any kind of food at all.
Perhaps I'm taking this all to seriously. However, an hour ago I finished all the lettuce in the box - enough for three salads - and my stomach and intestines are feeling better than they have in weeks. My head feels clearer too.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 09:16 pm (UTC)And when you responded by saying, "Businesses can sell only what people are buying from them", you were just making an observation that does not in any way contradict maggiedacatt's statement that "People can only buy what is offered to them", and you didn't mean to imply anything - anything at all - by making that simple observation.
Glad that's all sorted out.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 09:43 pm (UTC)I implied that both sides volunteer in market transactions (shopping for food).
And neither of these sides should blame another side for the choices they are making.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 10:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-15 11:09 pm (UTC)Yes, you may say that in the end people are blaming people. Though sometimes it's more convenient to think about it in terms of corporation and customers blaming each other.
But I lost your point here.
Is it your way to agree or disagree with what I wrote in previous comment?
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 06:11 am (UTC)I'm glad you acknowledge that consumers are people, and that corporations are collectives represented by people, and that this is all just people assigning blame to people.
With that established, would you agree that since all people are fundamentally the same, it is something in their surrounding environment that compels them to establish their diet preferences? And that since this is so, a wise person seeking to change the diet preferences of future generations would seek, among other things, to change the behavior of the people running the corporations that stock the store shelves?
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 03:13 pm (UTC)Surrounding environment compels people to establish their diet preferences.
Difference in people's choices compels surrounding shopping environment to change according to people's choices.
Even though wise person might want to influence corporation as part of the effort, such influence should have much lower priority, than direct influence on consumers.
The reason for that is that in consumers-corporation relationships consumers define behavior of corporations much more than corporations define behavior of consumers.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 05:09 pm (UTC)A "fundamental difference" between people is one that is manifest from the moment they are born and should be reflected in official policy - national, corporate, et cetera.
How this is elucidated depends on your personal philosophy. I, for one, believe that all people are created equal, as per the Declaration of Independence. If you believe in something different, I'd love to hear it.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 06:31 pm (UTC)People are born different from each other. At least somewhat different.
Almost always these differences should not be reflected in official policies.
So, in your definition of "fundamentally different" concept, people have almost no fundamental differences.
2) People are created equal in rights in eyes of the law. That does not mean that there are no differences between people.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 05:24 pm (UTC)When a corporation produces a widget, it is not just the customer who buys the widget - the consumer - that is affected. For example: If that corporation is dumping toxic waste into a river that is upstream from farmland in order to produce that widget, then the corporation is also affecting the health of a great many people that do not have a "consumer-corporate relationship" with the company.
You have based your whole argument around the bizarre straw man that "blaming others for my own problems is bad". But when a farmer's crop fails because his irrigation system is clogged up with toxic crap from upstream, or a thousand people fall ill further down the food chain, it makes perfect sense to blame the "other", the company in this case, for dumping toxic shit into the river, and to seek legal action and some policy change that will STOP the company from doing so in the future, and perhaps even compel the company to pay for the cleanup effort.
If you want to classify that farmer's action as "blaming others for my problems", then you can go ahead and do so, but you will be watering down your own principle to the point where it is useless.
no subject
Date: 2011-11-16 06:43 pm (UTC)But most of the time blaming others instead of focusing on solving internal problems is inefficient approach.
And in particular, making corporations more responsible than consumers for bad food choices consumers make -- is wrong.