A Lesson About Power, Food, and the Coronavirus
How I found a moment of peace in a crowded grocery store
I once read in a women’s magazine that the easiest way to eat healthy is to only shop the perimeter of a grocery store. The fresh fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy ring the walls. Candy, popcorn, and cookies lurk in the center.
Today, as a 24-year-old woman working at a tech company in New York, I follow this rule religiously. A typical Sunday grocery store trip is an exercise in self-discipline. How austere can I be?
I circle the store and buy the same items every week. I buy blueberries, bananas, and oatmeal; Brussels sprouts, spinach, and sweet potatoes; ground turkey, bell peppers, and avocados. For snacks, I select oranges, carrots, and hummus. I do not reach for chocolate. I do not buy full-fat cream cheese. I don’t even dare look at the baking aisle. Perhaps I toss in a nondairy coffee creamer.
This week, my grocery run took a turn. In the midst of swelling panic from the COVID-19 outbreak and a tornado of grocery hoarding — which experts advise is often more detrimental than beneficial — I found a moment of peace. I found it in a place I typically strive to never go: the center aisles.
New York is in a state of emergency. So is the nation. No one seems to know when the outbreak could escalate to the point of crisis, or how long it will last.
Without a timeline, how do you plan ahead? What do you buy?
Unfortunately, Brussels sprouts and spinach aren’t very good for disaster preparation. Neither are blueberries. In a crisis, the organic, low-calorie, low-carb, plant-based diet that New York’s privileged and affluent have agreed to eat, myself chief among them, is useless. Kale is useless.
The era of direct-to-consumer shopping led to a rise of “better for you” brands with sustainable supply chains and fresh ingredients. Shelf-stable, stalwart, consumer-packaged goods — known for high fat and low nutrition, laden with preservatives and chemicals — are no longer desirable.
But this week, I wasn’t looking for “better for you.” No, I was shopping for my bunker. (My apartment.) This week, I packed a cart full of brands I hadn’t purchased in a decade.
I bought Mott’s applesauce. Stouffer’s lasagna. Special K cereal. Pillsbury biscuits. Ritz crackers. Triscuits. Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Rice-A-Roni. Welch’s grape juice. Sunbelt chocolate chip granola bars. Ore-Ida hash browns. Totino’s pizza rolls.
Walking down the aisle was like walking back in time. These brands brought me back to a different stage in life — before I lived and worked in the most competitive city on Earth.
As I shopped, I thought of mornings in middle school, when my mom would make me an Eggo waffle before she left for the day. She was a working single mother with two kids and left the house most mornings by 7:00 a.m. But she took the time to make sure I had a hot waffle and a pat on the head. Some mornings she even smeared it with Nutella.
My brother and I would come home from school and eat Doritos until our fingers turned orange. Nestlé Drumsticks were sold from a small freezer in the school cafeteria. Unwrapping them was like unwrapping a present. Snickers and Kit Kat bars were lovingly slipped in my backpack, and I’d find them later, melty and soft in the Texas heat. On busy weeknights, after baseball games and dance recitals, my mom might pull a Stouffer’s lasagna from the oven, steaming and fragrant.
My dad’s specialty was breakfast: Hillshire Farm Lit’l Smokies sausages wrapped in Pillsbury biscuits and dunked in mustard, served with a hot cup of Folgers coffee. Magical.
Where did these brands go?
I stopped buying them as an adult, seeking to optimize and improve my life. Writer Jia Tolentino aptly described this optimization process: “The ideal woman steps into a stratum of expensive juices, boutique exercise classes, skincare routines and vacations, and there she happily remains,” Tolentino wrote. “The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing.”
The ideal woman does not microwave Stouffer’s lasagna at 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. But this week I did. And I was thrilled. Packing a cart full of bright boxes of sugar and fat felt like an act of rebellion. It was a small gesture, but a freeing one.
In middle school, I wasn’t counting calories or worried about artificial sugar substitutes. I couldn’t even spell aspartame. Food wasn’t a virtue signal to be used socially to convey my ethics, status, or worldview. It wasn’t an input for an optimization equation. It certainly wasn’t “self-care.” It was just food! It tasted good, and someone had spent time and money to make it for me.
Briefly, while staring at my coronavirus survival stockpile, I got to travel back to that time. It was an era before it mattered what I ate. I didn’t sit in an office chair at a computer all day. I ran and jumped and chased my brother in circles around the backyard.
As an adult, the process of choosing what food to consume is a constant fight: Good versus evil. Healthy versus unhealthy. Sustainable versus unsustainable. Affordable versus luxury.
For me, buying groceries is inherently an act of avoiding indulgences. Spending the afternoon shopping for healthy food, lugging it home, unpacking it, chopping vegetables, cooking rice, and packaging it all up in Tupperware for the week is my effort to resist the treats that call for me during the workday. If I’ve got a tub of fresh food with a sunk cost in the fridge, I’ve got a stronger defense against the street tacos, coconut milk lattes, lemon scones, hot pork dumplings, and Shake Shack burgers I know are just down the block from the office.
“Too many calories,” I tell myself as I walk by Starbucks on my way to work. “Too much money,” I say as I walk home past the garlic cloud of an Italian restaurant. Only sometimes do these thoughts stop me from caving. After I do, the guilt sets in. The internal monologue is never-ending.
And, I am incredibly lucky to even be able to have this monologue, restrictive as it is.
The financial ability to have a choice in one’s diet is a privilege. In addition to being fraught with personal health ramifications and social consequences, especially for women, food is political. It holds meaning for class, wealth, privilege, and culture, and remains glaringly unequal.
These long-lost foods that are an indulgence for me are staples for many, many others. And they don’t come without consequences: Cheaply produced meals with high fat and sugar content contribute to diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. All too often, these meals are the only choice a family has to put dinner on the table.
Now more than ever, our priorities must rise above optimization; above control, performance, and exclusion. In these turbulent weeks, when every scene on the news looks worse than the last, it is increasingly important we look to bring our communities together and care for those around us. This is a time to be inclusive. We can all look for common ground and for common purpose, even if not at a common table.
Sometimes, a Stouffer’s lasagna can help do just that.
