Image of fruit in a Swedish supermarket by Julia Georgallis. First published in July 2020 for The Bread Companion.
Food shopping is something that I feel pretty meh about on a day-to-day basis. There are a few different ways that my weekly food shop might look and none of them are perfect. They go something like this...
Option 1: Buy all my food from a speciality shop like a fish or cheesemonger, the butcher or the baker.
Pros: This is a really nice way to shop and the quality often unparalleled.
Cons: Often prohibitively expensive, there are none in my local area and I would have to make separate trips so very inconvenient.
Option 2: Shop in whichever Monolithic-Supermarket-Chain is nearest
Pros: Locally run, there are some well stocked gems.
Cons: Unreliable — I never know what I'm going to find.
Option 4: Subscription Grocery Services
Pros: Often good quality, solves a problem like waste or sustainability issues, I don't have to leave the house.
Cons: I don't want all of these potatoes. I like leaving the house.
In short, food shopping is not ideal.
But then, you go on holiday and food shopping in a FOREIGN supermarkets seems like a different thing entirely, morphing from something that is part of the daily grind to a past time. Supermarkets aren't actually really any different abroad. They're actually a bit shit in every country for the people who actually live there.
But by looking at the places where people shop, we can, at times, see the state a country might be in — be it politically, culturally or to analyse the values that people place around eating. Queues for hours and hours just to buy a piece of fruit (like in Brazil) denote unbalanced work systems. Towns with no good places to buy food expose fucked up food chains. Supermarket chain after supermarket chain show the arrival of capitalism. A plethora of artisanal shop either means a passion for food or, pass me the cold brew, the area has been gentrified. It’s a detective game. What kind of milk do people drink — cow, yak or plant? What are the vegetables that are on offer and where are these vegetables from — are they homegrown or imported? Yams, potatoes or rice? Being a supermarket tourist is so much more than looking at what brands are sold on each supermarket shelf. Foreign supermarkets are also often the best place to pick up local delicacies to bring home, screw the airport delis or the tourist shops, real deal locals get their real deal food from their local supermarket.
During my time living in Portugal, I realised that Portuguese supermarkets might actually be MORE rubbish than British ones (I really missed Waitrose, alright?) The really great produce still comes from small, independent fruterias, mercearias, peixarias and there is very little selection in the larger supermarket chains. On doing some digging about Portugal's food system, I found that many staples like flour, rice and sugar production are still entrenched in systems set by the country's former dictatorship (I wrote a piece about flour for Mold Magainze, if you want to read on). Conversely, when I was 22, I also lived in Italy. Which was obviously glorious, food wise, but I lived slightly out of town so had to shop in one of those enormous out of town supermarkets. And it was actually a decent shopping experience (I assume the situation may have changed now) — there was a variety of seasonal fruit and veg, much of it knobbly and sometimes even still had dirt on it. We all know how Italians feel about food — eating is taken INCREDIBLY seriously. So even the giant supermarkets retained their values of quality, or there'd be riots (again, please let me know what it's like 12 years on). Fast forward to a recent trip to a very small American rural township and we have a different scenario. There is one tiny, understocked supermarket that serves a couple of hundred people and the quality is shocking, the variety non existent and the prices extortionate. It turns the town into a 'food desert,' with people unable to access food because they can’t afford it, despite many of them being employed by the agriculture sector. It is a glitch in the food system, in political structures and a marginalisation of those who live in rural communities, a case of 'well you’re poor and you live too far away so we don’t really care what you eat, we’ll just take all this delicious food for us delicious city folk and then we’ll sell the rest so we can get all the cash and leave you guys still poor.'
What happens at the cash till is also interesting. In Sweden, a Swede once explained to me, each item must be placed one at a time onto the conveyer belt so that it can be easily and efficiently picked up by the cashier — a clue to the Swedish working environment. In Nepal, money is exchanged gently and respectfully rather than being passed hurriedly over a counter or thrown into our hands. And what about sustainability? In many Northern countries, plastic shopping bags come with a (albeit arbitrary) charge. But in almost every developing country I've ever been to, things are bagged and double bagged and bagged again — plastic is still a way of life because sustainability is still a privilege for the global west.
So supermarkets aren't perfect anywhere, but, sometimes, they are in fact the perfect place for a culture trip, a view into another society or an exciting food safari...
