Lost in the Supermarket

This was my first assignment for Magazine Writing:

“I’m all lost in the supermarket…I came in for that special offer, a guaranteed personality.” Yes, Strummer/Jones managed, in their mohawked, cut-off jean jacket way, to epitomize the grocery store experience, ironically, in a punk song. One of the earliest memories I have of supermarkets involves sitting inside a shopping cart and riding the vessel of consumerism like a white boy on safari. Exhilarating were the countless products rushing by in fluorescent panorama. Gradually, I would first be joined in the cart by some of these products – fruits, juices, rice, beans, carefully examined and often reluctantly approved by my vegetarian parents – and eventually displaced by them: the last stretch of the supermarket journey was always the least exciting. Not only did I have to carry my own weight (woe is me!) but the mysteries of the grocery store (as if anything changed each time) had all been revealed by the time we got in line at the cashier – and don’t get me started on lines.

May the image of a wild-haired diminutive clutching the sides of a shopping cart from within stand as chapter one of this odyssey. 

As aforementioned, my parents were vegetarians and it wasn’t long before a Wild Oats – and then a Whole Foods – opened nearby. At Wild Oats particularly, there would always be mini shopping carts so that the children could do their own “shopping”. This was really quite brilliant because I would be adding countless of my own preferential items to the trunk of our Hyundai sedan, but more importantly because I would hereby discover that it was actually more fun to push the extra weight of a cart than to be chauffeured. You know, the toddler in grown-up’s clothing bit. May that image stand as chapter two.

Chapter three, then, could be my current tendency to feverish shopping-cart-drivership up and down the aisles, scrounging for the cheapest possible foodstuffs necessary for my survival. The fun is over – this is eat or be eaten! Well, not quite. Eat long-grain organic brown rice or microwaveable white rice with bits of panchromatic supposed vegetables. The dilemma seems almost as dire.

I did indeed once get lost in a supermarket, though. It seemed like the biggest place in the whole world, that if I didn’t find my mommy, no one would ever find me. Aisles and aisles of food products formed an impossible labyrinth in which the people I knew were reduced to shadows, tadpoles in an ocean of feet, hiding behind mountains of Lean Cuisine. It felt very much like drowning. Perhaps that was why steering your own shopping cart was nicer than being steered: if you’re in control, you cannot get lost. It never seemed plausible that mommy, with her great big cart of edibles, had ever gotten lost. Control. Here’s where I would end this with a Joy Division quote, but I digress.