Overconsumption of high-fat and sugar-laden foods is a problem for people in the United States because it contributes to obesity, diabetes, and heart decease. The ubiquitous shopping cart contributes to this problem by encouraging grocery store customers to purchase more than they need. In much the same way that Clarence Saunders’ chain of Piggly Wiggly stores, which first opened in 1916, became an archetype for the supermarket, the first shopping cart, invented by Sylvan Goldman in 1937, created an archetypical category so ubiquitous that it permeates a majority of the retail environment in 2016.  

An archetype according to Deyan Sudjic must have “a form that is distinctive enough to successfully create a new category of object.” This form is usually born out of a combination of necessity and ingenuity. In the case of the shopping cart, the advent of the supermarket combined with the spread of commercial refrigeration and synthetic preservatives allowed shoppers to store food for much longer without the worry of spoilage. With these technological advances, a psychological barrier to buying larger quantities of food was overcome, but a very physical one remained: the amount one could comfortably carry around the store in a wire mesh basket.  Goldman, an Oklahoma supermarket tycoon, could see his customers heading to the register not because they were done shopping, but because they’d filled the basket or it had become uncomfortably heavy. He was struck with a moment of ingenuity late one night when he realized a folding chair with wheels and two basket holders could be made into a collapsible cart. Thus was born the “Folding Basket Carrier,” and with it the shopping cart archetype. With the exception of the automobile,
it is difficult to find a single object that more profoundly shaped consumer habits in the 20th century. 

Despite its importance in driving consumer spending and its culture prevalence as a universal signifier of commerce in both an industrial and post industrial sense, the shopping cart has receive little attention from designers. Unlike lamps and chairs, designers are not ruthlessly competing to create the next iconic shopping cart.  In fact, the design has remained relatively unchanged in an aesthetic sense since Orla Watson’s incorporation of a folding back to create the “Telescoping Cart” in 1946. 

The cart is utility manifest. It is modernity without pretention. It is the automobile’s silent compatriot allowing for the deleterious distribution of goods to consumers at a previously unimaginable pace. And, it is other things: the cage for young childrens’ squirming legs, the mother’s reliever of jars broken in aisles, the vagrants roaming bottle collector, the car denting parking lot culprit, the inebriated teenagers produce section drag racer. 
Although it permeates the American psyche, if a random cross section of the public were surveyed about their emotional relationship to the cart, it is highly unlikely that even one person would elicit a strong affective response. However, when researchers Mihai Niculescu and Collin R. Payne from New Mexico State University added mirrors to the shopping carts in an El Paso supermarket they made an interesting discovery. People who could see an image of themselves while shopping would buy 10% more fruits and vegetables. While the cart itself seems banal, it is the vehicle for food and thereby for the relationship between body image, health and consumption. This is surely one of the most deeply affective relationships that exist in modern American society. 

Like many ubiquitous objects of the 20th century, the shopping cart has been seamlessly integrated into the iconography of the information age. Carts on Amazon.com are infinitely large and checkout line displays follow customers around the Internet on banner adds and in paid search results. The temptation of an impulse buy is now at everyone’s fingertips even as they sit to read the morning paper. As the act of grocery shopping moves steadily from supermarket to smartphone the physical acts that make up a trip to the store will be lost. With them, so many affordances will slip away and even the minimal positive feedback loops that exist in the current supermarket model, such as seeing that one’s cart is glaringly sparse on vegetables, will be gone. If signifiers intended to nudge shoppers toward healthier choices are not built into the online grocery shopping experience, the epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease will surely grow worse.    

Works Cited

Crockett, Zachary. “How a Basket on Wheels Revolutionized Grocery Shopping,” Priceeconomic.com, 2016.

Moss, Michael “Nudged to the Produce Aisle by a Look in the Mirror,” The New York Times, 2013.

Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things. Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2013.

Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved, the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2008.

Sudjic, Deyan. “Design and its Archetypes” The Language of Things: Understanding The World of Desirable Object. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

As an initial mode of inquiry into our cultural attitudes toward food, I explored my feelings and assumptions about Blue Apron dinners with a pastiche of Barthe’s essay “The New Citroën.” This little nugget of self-righteous banter reaches its crescendo in the passage transposed below.

But, oh! The sweetness of diminished cognitive load does hum in our collective ear. To never enter the grocery store again. What joy! And then also why not forgo cooking completely. Perhaps carrots could be plucked from the ground by drones, sliced mid-flight, and dropped directly into app-controlled frying pans. The post-war dream of TV dinner finally realized in the local food era as the Jetsons’ Rosie wheels in to wash, rinse and sanitize the remaining dirty dishes.

This passage rings with a variety of assumptions from overt to subcutaneous. The ironic tone presupposes that the reader would not prefer this fully automated future, while simultaneously admitting that the writer (ME!) sort of / kind of admires that future.  Sentence two assumes the reader is busy, that the reader suffers from choice fatigue, that she FEELS OVERWHELMED. Sentence three asserts, without mentioning why, that the reader dislikes grocery shopping, whether the edifice itself or the act of shopping is unclear. Sentences four and five suppose the reader is living in 2016 and, at a minimum, understands the basic functioning of drones and apps both literally and societally. The final sentence assumes the reader is cognizant of American popular culture in the not so distant past.

After this quick dissection of the obvious assumptions, two short and explicative sentences remain. While seemingly innocuous, “But, oh!” and “What joy!” pick at a deeper assumption about advertising and control in American consumer culture. They attempt to utilize the same language that TV and radio advertisements have recycled for decades—a simple exclamation intended to appeal to the visceral.

The visceral speaks to the consumer/reader’s “lizard brain” inspiring a subconscious desire to satisfy base cravings. Behavioral level needs (food) and visceral level desires (Pop Tarts®) are corralled by the immaterial advertisement and linked to a physical place, the supermarket.

Few modern people realize that supermarkets are patented inventions. The process of self-service, or picking one’s own items from the shelf, is little more than 100 years old. Prior to this, goods were kept behind closed gates. Clerks took their clients’ lists and retrieved all desired food items from the back. Clerks didn’t impulse buy for you.

In early supermarkets, shoppers were required to follow a zig-zag maze from entry to cash register. Along the way, they would pass every single item for sale in the store. “In plan view,” says Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, the Hidden Battle for the World Food System, “the internal geography of the store balanced stock control with the communicative architecture of what was, ultimately, the first consumption factory.”

Over the years, store designs have relaxed giving shoppers the “freedom” to dart in and out of aisles or simply circle the stores perimeter if desired. This only occurred after consumers “internalized the cost saving measures of the self-service.” So now, when Joe Shopper is on his way home from work and his car radio exclaims that Anderson Erickson Milk and Pop Tarts® on sale at Safeway, a series mediators is engages beginning with the visceral feeling of elation. The relationship between the advertisement and the feeling is necessarily subconscious. Next, a conscious thought occurs, Gee, I really need some milk and eggs. Then subconsciously, where do I get milk and eggs? The supermarket. Safeway. 

Joe turns his car toward the supermarket. He enters through double automatic doors, an airlock keeping ALL THIS FRESHNESS safe from the outside world. Joe knows the milk and eggs are in the far back corner. He doesn’t need to have been to this store or even to a Safeway brand store to know this. It is part of the collective consciousness, of the mise en scene of our time and place. To get to the milk, Joe successfully navigates piles of apples and onions, but when he stumbles upon the Soda–Mazing™ Crush Orange Pop-Tarts® it is just too much for him and two boxes end up in his basket. Joe hangs a right into the snack aisle and ends up with a full basket. On his way to the register he notices an interesting headline in People and quietly grabs a King Size Snickers®. It isn’t until he is back in the car that Joe realizes he’s forgotten the milk and eggs.

The advertisement sets off a chain of mediators that ALWAYS ends at a row of registers. Despite a more relaxed floor plan, the “factory for consumption” is alive and well. This is because “consumerism today has constructed us, built consuming people at the same time as building consumer goods.”

Affordance in design—the relationship between a physical object and a person—is both resultant of the world in which it resides and simultaneously creates that world. In the supermarket context affordance is defined as all physical arrangements that exist between a shopper and merchandise. This affordance must be based in an ordering of things, in, as Foucault says, “categories that make it possible for us to name, speak, and think.” An entire pseudo academic field known as ‘atmoshperics’ has emerged to study the exact anatomy of the retail environment. Atmoshpericists would, for instance, study the relationship of a musical tempo to shopping patterns. What the modern shopper could not possible comprehend is how thoroughly the affordances of their experience within the supermarket have been sculpted to maximize profit.

Aimee Lee Ball’s piece in New York Time Style Magazine entitled, “The Anti Packaging Movement,” studies manifestations of zero waste grocery stores across Europe. On the surface of things she shows how the zero waste experience differs  only slightly from ‘regular’ grocery shopping, but she sidesteps the history of the supermarket and the internalization of self-shopping categories that make it possible for the modern shopper to name, speak, and think. There is “nothing hippieish” about these stores, Ms. Ball assures her reader, urging them that the aesthetics of zero waste shopping will trump the supermarket experience. “The bins of caramels and quinoa and arrangements of olives and honey are at eye level, essentially advertising themselves, their actual shapes and colors replacing photos on packages.” This beliefs that a foods “actual shapes and colors” will automatically signify its intended use is based in pre-supermarket episteme—an ordering of the world that has been battered so ruthlessly by the coalesced forces of advertisement, food science, and atmospherics, that is scarcely exists in 2016, particularly in lower socioeconomic sectors.

When Foucault wrote The Order of Things, these forces were relatively new. Could the internalization of ‘self shopping’ that ultimately upended and redefined the entire world of retail sales have pushed us into a new epistemetic era? Might the ordering of our consumptive habits be so completely different that food, sitting in a bin, free of words and photographs, no longer signify itself?

Works Cited

Ball, Aimee Lee. “The Anti-Packaging Movement,” The New York Times Style Magazine, 2016.

Foucault, Michel. “Preface” The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans: Les Mots et les Choses. New York: Random House, 1970.

Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things. Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2013.

Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved, the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2008.

The modern grocery experience is rife with excesses, whether physical in the form of boxes, bins and bags or psychological in the form of advertisement and choice fatigue. In the last 10 years, boutique grocery stores that embrace a zero waste philosophy have sprouted up across Europe. The concept of “precycling” or subverting the use of new plastic, aluminum, and steel prior to consumption was touted by the EPA more than 20 years ago, but it is yet to catch on in a substantial way in the United States.

Aimee Lee Ball’s March 14, 2016 piece in the New York Time Style Magazine entitled, “The Anti Packaging Movement,” covers manifestations of this phenomenon across Europe. Ms. Ball asserts the importance of good design in these establishments who’s owners “are as aesthetically sophisticated as they are ethically minded” and goes on to explain that they are “trying to change how we shop by presenting the market as a curated space.” Though she does not overtly mention the higher costs associated with sophistication and curation, the syntax and references used throughout the piece firmly establish the world within which she sees these zero waste grocery stores. It is clearly a world of privilege, of the highly educated, of those (unsurprisingly) who might pick up The New York Times Style Magazine.

The fact that the number of cereals available for purchase at these stores has been reduced to offer only a few choices is not inherently classist. However, the fact that Ms. Ball describes them as “curated spaces” with foods selected by “righteous cognoscenti” is. This is not to say that the stores themselves don’t relish this type of exclusivity. There are “certain organic groceries in France and Belgium” that allow “shoppers to decant vinegars, wines and detergents from gleaming steel tubes into reusable bottles with silk-screened labels designed by a typographer.” Here, Ball’s language plays delightfully with the storeowners’ intent, which is made manifest if objects. Notice that at “certain” (not some!) grocery stores one may “decant” (not pour!) vinegars, wines and detergents (what about powders?) and be rewarded with “silk-screened labels designed by a typographer.” Reverence for the bespoke, which I spoke about in prompt one, is a well-established tenant of the foodie elite. What better way to delineate for whom this store is intended than with silk screen and custom typography?

There is “nothing hippieish” about these stores, Ms. Ball assures her reader. Depending on one’s reading of “hippy” this could mean any number of things. The affordance of the distribution system itself is essentially identical to any number of bulk food sections at “hippy” grocery stores across the U.S. and Europe. By this I mean that the dimensions and functions of bulk bins, the system of self-selecting quantities, of entering PLU numbers, and of calculating tare weights is relatively unchanged. An unyielding, self-righteous ideology is often seen as “hippieish,” but this too can be found in this new brand of foodie elitism.

When Ms. Ball assuages her readers of their hippy fears then, she must be speaking aesthetically. “The bins of caramels and quinoa and arrangements of olives and honey are at eye level, essentially advertising themselves, their actual shapes and colors replacing photos on packages.” These beliefs that objects are “actual shapes and colors,” that up is up, and down is down, and most importantly that a food’s affordances will automatically signify its intended use are based in an early twentieth century episteme—an ordering of the world that has been battered so ruthlessly by the coalesced forces of advertisement and food science that is scarcely exists in 2016, particularly in lower socioeconomic sectors. When Foucault wrote on the order of things, these forces were relatively new. Could the combination of television, advertisement, and global distributions systems along with the advent of the Internet have pushed us into a new epistemetic era? Might the ordering of the natural world be so completely different that food, sitting in a bin, free of words and photographs, no longer signify itself?

Works Cited

Ball, Aimee Lee. “The Anti-Packaging Movement,” The New York Times Style Magazine, 2016.

Foucault, Michel. “Preface” The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans: Les Mots et les Choses. New York: Random House, 1970.

Norman, Don. The Design of Everyday Things. Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2013.

The following is a pastiche based on Roland Barthes' essay "The New Citroën" 

I think that healthy food today is exactly equivalent to white tie evening wear in 19th century England: I mean the defining currency of a certain rarified class for whom food not only provides sustenance, but also acts as cultural currency. Using codified language the modern menu creates a bastion of exclusivity that, with rutabagas and dandelion greens, presses against the very boundaries of scripture.

One foolproof indicator that this phenomenon is acquiring an exclusive mystique is it’s appropriation by corporations that seek to repackage and sell it to the masses. Take, for instance, the blue apron dinner.  Here we have all the pretentions of the burgeoning “foodie” class neatly packed into boxes that arrive weekly on one’s doorstep. Like a Matryoshka doll, the layers of plastic and cardboard peel away to reveal minuscule quantities of peppercorn and olive oil.

The Modern Tech Company presupposes that one is prone to lack even the most elemental ingredients of a classic pantry. Is this true? Most likely, yes. This is why throngs of consumers have brazenly embraced a modality of cooking so thoroughly reciped that straying from the course is equated to desertion. Words, with their pesky insistence on exact quantities and precise heat levels have long dominated the home chefs psyche. With the addition of prepackaged ingredients the recipe’s suggestions become prescriptions. The preparation of food, the foreplay to eating, the stoking of appetite, cascades incrementally down the spectrum from art to science.    

But, oh! The sweetness of diminished cognitive load does hum in our collective ear. To never enter the grocery store again. What joy! And then also why not forgo cooking completely. Perhaps carrots could be plucked from the ground by drones, sliced mid flight, and dropped directly into app-controlled frying pans. The post-war dream of TV dinner finally realized in the local food era as the Jetsons’ Rosie swoops in to wash, rinse and sanitize the remaining dirty dish.

We have then entered a possible future made tangible by the new social contract, the app, and the modern servant, the machine. We are dealing here with the democratization of knowledge and The Modern Tech Company will not let you forget this. Take, for instance, the preparation of “Late-Summer Fregola Sarda.” (https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/late-summer-fregola-sarda-pasta-with-romano-beans-ricotta-crispy-capers)

The recipe page is built to be harmonious and simple, to ease the spirit, to deescalate the eternal pressing feeling that THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME. Thus, the first and most important statistic is listed in all caps. COOK TIME: 25-35 mins. Next, the intended situation. MAKES: 2 servings. And finally, the Holy Grail. NUTRITION: 705 calories. In three quick glances one ascertains the outer boundaries of his commitment.

Having established a working relationship, the page dives into the (hypothetical) bread and butter of the arrangement. It satisfies one’s longing to eat local by assuring him that the dish is “brimming with the seasonal flavors of Romano beans.” Then, in sly parenthesis, it panders to the gastronomically uninformed, “(a robust flat bean popular in Italy)”.  This sentiment is echoed further down the page when one is reminded to, “Never underestimate the importance of mise en place, French for "set in place."

This staccato dance from high falutin to overtly explanatory is the magnum opus of“the democratization of knowledge.” Not only will one know how to do a thing, he will know the correct French phrases to subsequently make others feel sufficiently excluded. The absurdity of this situation is drawn into focus by the fact that between statements one and two lies a video entitle, “How To: Safely Cut Round Vegetables.” Fear not, for every man may now sleep soundly in his superiority, assuaged by the knowledge that he can not only mise en place the shit out of a Romano bean, he can safely cut it too.

Work Cited:

Bather, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957

http://www.lamag.com, Sherer, Josh. LA Magazine. “The 10 Most Annoying Words and Phrases on Menus, Ranked,” 2016.

Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2012