Changing The Culture Of Food From Corporate To Cooperative
I have joined with others to help build a food co-op in our community. And it has come to my attention that in order to build a co-op we must first create a culture that wants and values what a co-op can do for them. And becoming aware of that, I also realized that supermarkets had to first create a culture that wanted and valued what they could provide, which was convenience and low prices.
There is no doubt supermarkets are able to provide convenience and low prices. But the convenience the supermarket provides all too often leads us into making choices we would rather not make. We make less healthy food choices because it is more convenient to buy packaged and processed food rather than fresh. It is similar to the convenience a steer experiences when walking the convenient path of the cattle chute. The end result is unpleasant but the journey to get there is rather effortless. And there is no question a supermarket can provide low prices. But their low prices were derived from paying farmers less, paying workers less, and tending to the environment less. We pay in other ways, just not so much at the checkout where we most notice it.
The supermarkets had to create a culture that valued soda over water, Doritos over fruit, frozen and canned over fresh.
They created a culture where children sit and watch commercials for Mountain Dew while eating alone rather than cooking with grandma.
They had to create strip malls and do away with downtowns. They had to create stores with distractions and noise so you weren’t focused and self-directed. They had to create shopping spaces where the good stuff and the necessities are hard to get to and the impulse buys and the junk food are practically jumping off the shelves at you. Not just at you but your kids, too, who cry because they can’t have the stuff in the colorful wrappers that rot their teeth and cause obesity and make it hard for them to concentrate. That stuff that’s sitting at eye height of a child lessens their capacity for impulse control, and that’s just fine for the people who own supermarkets.
They had to create a culture that was loud and brash and in your face. That didn’t appeal to your better nature but to your weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
They created a culture where children were not protected but exploited and abused. Because children with impulse control were less profitable than those without. Because selling natural foods meant more money going to farmers and less to them.
They created a culture where water was sold in plastic bottles that take 450 years to break down because it was more profitable than alternatives. They sold fruit pealed and stuck in plastic containers.
They created a culture where packaging became more important than product, where words and images on the outside of a container influenced purchasing decisions more than the nutrition inside.
They created a culture where perception meant more than reality. Where milk derived from factory farms where cows never see daylight is wrapped in packaging with images of cows in meadows under a smiling sun.
They didn’t sell food so much as they did a lifestyle. And that lifestyle took, resulting predictably in increased obesity, diabetes, and poor cognitive function. For children and adults alike.
The fight I see myself involved in is to focus once more upon food and not upon the packaging. The fight is to get people to see what is real and to see through what is mere marketing. A decade and more ago I wouldn’t even have attempted it, because the money and power behind the marketing was just too great. But those who push the culture of the supermarket now have to try to defend the culture they have created, while I only have to point out its failures and the damage it has done. I think this is a winnable fight.