July 17, 2024
i was recently trudging around a target waiting for my girlfriend to try on clothes, passing through the grocery section at an attempt to stave off my hunger until i would get home and eat two blocks of tofu scramble. the produce section is familiar to me; i am a glutton for fruit and if not for seasonality would eat peaches, plums, and mangoes every day. the only item on that side which falls into disfavor would be papaya. dairy and eggs are mostly recognizable – a lot of modified yogurts, but all offering meaningful differences. while contemplating the seasonings for my scramble i wondered into the snacks section.
an aside – i recently volunteered at a food bank schlepping food sent from walmarts across the country into smaller boxes deemed “usable”, “expired”, and “unusable”. all kinds of candy bars, packaged foods, and cans passed through my hands. none of it anything i had ever gone to a store intending to buy. i’ve bought a twinkie once in my life to give to a cousin. these items were fairly abstracted from the original concept of food. trite point, but most distinguished by containing various forms of corn. this is not existentially horrifying to me – if baking is chemistry, mass production of baked goods requires this sort of chemical engineering, and corn is a cheap feedstock – but rather, i’m not sure of the point of these transformations.
as a top-down view, the consumption of food is a biological act to obtain the energy and building blocks needed for survival. if you’re michael pollan, you’re likely to point out that there are important social and cultural aspects to eating as well, which i fully agree with! but are immaterial in this context. given the purely material frame, we have the goal of obtaining the optimal amount of nutrition while minimizing the resources used to obtain this nutrition: money and time.
the foods with the lowest $/kcal values are likely oil, then flour, then sugar, but transforming these into something which can be eaten regularly costs time, so lets exclude baking. though, this is likely why all these little pastries i packaged were sent from walmart in the first place – they’re cheap, calorically dense, and take zero time to prepare, perfect for a food bank. my main issue with them is that they’re not particularly satisfying – on the occasion that i eat an apple fritter (my favorite pastry), i’m hungry soon after. the same goes for when i used to eat bags of takis.
after the essential baking ingredients there are some staples: rice, oats, beans, milk, eggs, lentils, peanut butter, etc. all of these exceed the $/kcal value of fast food and are not time intensive. rice, beans, lentils all take some time to prepare but can be done with a little forethought (as an avid eater of some combination of the three, i usually throw them in a slow cooker with the spices i want and forget about it). the rest can be done in minutes. the above combination alone is fairly nutritious, if a little light on protein (soybeans are comparable to other beans in price, higher in protein, but require more preparation).
back in the grocery snacks aisle, what stands out is the combination of variety of items and the lack of usefulness of them. i do not know what purpose harissa-flavored ketchup serves. or three kinds of oreos. and so on. it seems like false innovation, all items which do not improve people’s quality of life but promising different forms of that which we’ve consumed forever. there are some things that when brought into the world have materially changed peoples’ lives (think cars, penicillin, capacitors, etc.); equally many which whether they had existed or not would not change much. these infinite variations on essential food items are in the latter category. the essential feeling of this aisle: who does it serve?
we are in abundance; that we have basically eliminated famine in the west is a wonder of modernity. between over- and undernutrition i’d happily take the former. however, faced with the absence of one of the four horsemen we’ve been left scratching our heads fruitlessly asking ourselves: what next? and filling this void with the treadmill of new products which offer nothing but new experiences. this search for new products/experiences can be good – some foods may create lasting foodways which distinguish a culture hundreds of years from now – but many seem deleterious to our health. also this may sound annoying but i legitimately get so much enjoyment out of rice and beans drenched in salsa tbh (there have been consecutive weeks where i have eaten this for 5-6/7 dinners)
abstraction should offer additional value. however, that which is in front of me in the snacks aisle doesn’t! in raw utilitarian terms, nothing in the aisle beats the staples when it comes to dollars/kcal, only barely does in units of kcal/second-preparation, and definitely does not in nutrition-dollars/kcal. from a socio-cultural view these foods are usually enjoyed alone and exclude the social component of eating. who does this serve?