Quintessential American: Supermarket

Many institutions have been said to be prototypical American—the drive in fast food joint, the baseball park, the shopping mall, the amusement park, but for me the quintessential American institution, the thing that has set the mold for what it is to grow up and live in America is the food supermarket.

When my mother-in-law returned to America after a dozen years abroad, what amazed her more than anything was the supermarket where we shopped  for groceries.

Now this is a woman who was born in Missouri, graduated from Berkeley, as white bread and heartland a growing up as you can get. But she had married an engineer who worked for Mobil Oil, so she had spent years living all around the world, wherever they drill for oil: Saudi Arabia, England (North Sea), New Foundland, and Norway.

Coming home, she was unfazed by the traffic, and she adjusted quickly to everything else, but the supermarket we took her to in Bethesda, Maryland stunned her.

The store Giant Food, was not too different from supermarkets you find in any American suburb. It was a typical supermarket, but a little more so. It occupied about a city block, and it had a bakery, butcher, produce, pharmaceuticals, hardware, lawn furniture, a gourmet section, a delicatessen, aisle after aisle of prepared food, barbecued chicken. You could go in and buy food for a month, as some people did, or you could buy a pre cooked dinner, ready to be taken home.

When it was first built around 1959, the locals were just as astonished by it as my mother-in-law was in 1990. It was called Super Giant then, but as other stores were built around the Washington metropolitan area, it became simply, “Giant.”

It was started and for decades own and run by a man named Israel Cohen, who visited each store, and wandered through talking to employees.

One of them told me about his first day on the job, in the produce section, and Israel Cohen ambles up and asks him how the peaches were that day. The stock boy said he didn’t know and Cohen said, “Well, I own this store and I want my employees to know all about the stuff they sell, so every day you come in, take a bite out of a peach, and take a bite out of the other stuff, so if someone asks, you can tell her whether the peaches are ripe or whatever.”

“Gee, Mr. Cohen,”  the stock boy said, “I thought if I were caught eating the food, they’d fire me.”

Cohen laughed and said, no, this was considered part of the job.  Cohen took a liking to the stock boy and eventually offered to pay his way through the University of Maryland, if the boy would promise to work a year at Giant  for every year he went to college.

The check out people, all the employees of the store,  knew Mr. Cohen and I never heard any of them say a bad word about him, and they smiled every time his name was mentioned.  He hired people with Down’s syndrome to help load the cars out front, when people came by for their grocery bags.

Ultimately, after Mr. Cohen died, Giant Food was sold to some international company, headquartered in The Netherlands, and the place became less friendly, less family, but it continued to offer a vast spectrum of food, and other products. 

I always thought of it as one of those big American enterprises which was essentially benign, a positive force in the world, one of those things that made you feel fortunate to be an American.

Later, traveling to Italy, I discovered grocery stores of a similar scale, and considerably higher tech—where you purchased your food simply by placing it in your shopping cart (and it was automatically charged to your credit card) so there was no check out line. And your cart was conveyed automatically down to the basement garage by a sort of cart escalator, so you didn’t have to drive around to have your bags loaded. But nothing anywhere I went ever quite matched the majesty, the efficiency and the sheer diversity of Giant.

And yet, having read Michael Pollin’s Omnivore’s Dilemma  and now being aware how little of what is offered in the American supermarket is actually unprocessed, unadulterated, and how the supermarket is just the final common pathway to the consumer, the final connection from a long line of industrial animal production, the whole institution seems less benign.

It’s the old story of the dazzling product, which seems so wonderful, but it has been gotten to you by a trail of tears, or at least by a pretty dubious process.

Those steaks, wrapped so appealingly in their plastic packages were once a cow imprisoned in a metal gated pen, standing knee deep in its own excrement, pumped full of industrial doses of antibiotics to ward off the bacteria festering in its wounds, and you have no idea when you buy it.

The stuff in the magnificently decorated  cardboard boxes with cereal in side—Gorgeous colorful Fruit Loop boxes—proclaiming their high fiber content as a health benefit of eating what is essentially close to pure sugar, it’s just so many lies, and a road to obesity, early coronary artery disease and dental decay.

Industry does not intend to harm us—it simply is not interested in the question of who may be harmed by its functions. It’s only concern is profit.

And that is, now at least, America.

Money rules.

For a while, in the 60’s, it was fashionable to speak out against commerce and profit and American industry, and the willingness to despoil the environment and to damage the public health, as long as profits increased.

But now that is all out of fashion.  We are back to being hard headed about the bottom line,

We are, after all, Americans.