Small Portions and a Bag, Please; Or, How They Even Bag the Bags in the U.K.--A Sociology of the Grocery Store

I have never seen anything quite like it before.  I walk into the grocery store in the U.K and am ready to shop.  Okay, give it to me, I say.  Let's see how the Brits do grocery shopping, cause you know in the states, we take grocery stores seriously, i mean really seriously.

However, I no sooner begin to walk down the isles when I am struck by a realization that does not require a doctorate in sociology to catch. Everything, I mean everything, is bagged, boxed, sealed: the fruit are sealed, the vegetables are sealed; heck, even the magazines are in bags!  I am serious.  Now, in the states, in all fairness, one does often find magazines in bags, but it is usually the naughty ones. Here, even the gardening magazines are bagged.  It makes me want to buy one. What? 

(This picture of the fresh produce in a Marks & Spencer 
was taken from the Green Gourmet Giraffe) 

 

As I am standing there I think, this is the student's grocery store.  Maybe they don't want the kids putting their disease-infested paws on the merchandise.  I mean, cause just about every third kid here has been coughing for the past week like the plague is moving into town. 

To test my theory I decide to run next door to the upscale grocery store--which is, literally, next door, in the next building.  That close?  Yes.  I think it is showing off.  The upscale store is called Marks & Spencer, which is the U.K.'s equivalent of Whole Foods in the States.  However, they also sell clothing, appliances--you name it.  In fact, I got a really nice wool sweater for only 29 pounds.

I look around and, again, everything is in little packages.  In fact, they come off the delivery truck this way.  Now, I think to myself, I have a bad back and have my wife and daughter lift everything at home--common, they're strong--but I have to say that I think that even my metro-sexual self could carry these packages and look rather manly.

"Excuse me mam, but I have to carry in the baby carrots..."

But then I panic.  Something is not right here.  "Where is Jamie Oliver!" I scream, "Does he know about this?"  

For those in the States who eat at McDonalds and have yet to hear of Jamie Oliver, he is a world-renown, rock-star cooking phenomenon.  Maggie (my wife) and I, who are total foodies, used to watch his first major British export show, The Naked Chef--I am sure to many a girl or guy's chagrin, Jamie, who is rather good looking, was not naked.  But, the food was, and that is the point.  One of Jamie Oliver's missions has been to improve the quality of food people eat in the U.K., the states and places elsewhere.  He is particularly concerned about obesity issues and the quality of food in school cafeterias.  In short, he is a good bloke!

Oliver's concern with food and obesity, as I click my heels together, reminds me there is no place like home--back in the damn, good, old U-S-of-A.  Suddenly I am teleported back to the States, in the background is Jamie Oliver singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Now, if the packages in the UK are tiny, the opposite is true in the states.  Here, we like it BIG! BIG! And really DAMN BIG!  Yeah, common now, I want 500 rolls of toilet paper on sale and an extra-large bag of 3000 frozen shrimp!  I got a party tonight"

Fact is, in the states we like everything in our grocery stores to be huge, with thousands and thousands of selections--here, for example, is a list of hundreds and hundreds of U.S. grocery store chains.

(An American Grocery Store, taken from the
interesting travel blog, American Corporate Runaway)

We need twenty-five different yogurt selections; fifty different brands of potato chips; we need high quality beef, medium quality beef, etc.  And all the beef, or well most of it, is pumped with red dyes to make it look beautiful!  The exception to such wonder, of course, is the meat sold in poor grocery stores or the stuff 'on sale' today for the low-low-price of diarrhea or botulism.  Hell, we even wax the lettuce in the states, or in the better grocery stores we spray it regularly with mists of water gathered by monks from the Himalayan mountains and piped in fresh, from a water pipe millions of miles away.  Also, don't forget the polished apples, the 'tourched-ripened' bananas and the availability of fruits all year round, even though such things should only be available when in season.


I can go on, oh yes I can.  Fact is, you do not want me to get started about food.  I spend lots of time on food in my classes.  And when I do, my students often start crying and screaming, suddenly the world around them loses meaning, they begin pulling out their hair, realizing the burgers they eat contain a thousand different cow parts, and are regularly pumped with pink slime--yes, the soylent pink, watch this brilliant video by Jamie Oliver.

Suddenly I hear Charlton Heston screaming--soylent green, it's people! (For the younger audience, this is the acting vacuum in which we existed until Will Smith--my hero!--came along) The students get up, madness in their eyes, they run for the doors, begging the god in which they believe to restore normality, like lemmings they run at the windows, diving onto the grass, getting in their cars and driving right into lake Erie.

The dust settles and all that remains is one skinny male student, with a grin on his face, as he could give a crap less, hung over, but making it all right by eating a fast food hamburg,

"You Rock! Dr. C. Great lecture!  Way to give 'em hell!  You're the best!"

As I stand there, it strikes me that, while the UK has an obesity problem catching up quickly with the states, it seems that, at least here in Durham, their portioned, packaged and modest approach--albeit unattractive to my 'farm-market' eye--is an interesting counterpoint to the 'model-like' runway of food display in the states.  Both have their pros and cons

"Dear god," I finally say, "give me some of that burger."  Okay, the meat has calmed my primitive brain down.  All I need, now, is a tiny package of shrink-wrapped peaches.

Back to the UK, somewhere over the cellophane rainbow, do I go...