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

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.”

-Ernest Hemingway