My Supermarket Nightmare

Sometimes, when my normal shopping routine falls apart, I find myself in the city, in rush hour, amongst the hordes of suited workers disgorged from offices, like me, looking for a way to fill the bellies of their families without dropping dead from exhaustion.

I look for a supermarket for a grab-and-run foray, before making the tedious journey home to a hungry child, demanding an instant, but nevertheless delicious, meal.

I make my way, downstairs, to some awful basement, deceptively called a 'food hall', with artificial lighting, no fresh air and no genuinely fresh food.

I feel disconcerted, in this Underworld of wandering, death-pallored shoppers, moving silently in the glaring light and stale, recycled air, to the beat of some musak-al assault.The ambience is the same as the food----all part of a systemised, homogenised diet, to be fed to the masses, developed by marketeers and business consultants, who abide by their own law, not the law of good food or good living.

I feel like I have stepped into the grotesque dreamscape of Inka Essenhigh's dystopic painting Shopping. This supermarket has more colour than the steely blue of Essenhigh's world, where food outlets are as cold and technological as the factories their processed products come from, but the feeling is the same. It is a degraded experience. The food is degraded. The physical environment is degraded. The people who work there are degraded. And so are the customers. Unlike the Stepford-ish women who populate Essenhigh's picture, I don't have Barbie-doll makeup and platinum bleached hair, but just by being here, I am beginning to feel like they look, like a mannequin in a supermarket theme-park, distinctly Stepford-ish, and, like the fellow shoppers I observe around me, I slip smoothly into vacant gear as I glide the aisles. For this particular chunk of my life, I am somehow less human. My existence is less rich. This is life 'desublimated', to use Herb Marcuse's phrase.

I start with the vegetable section, where all my meals begin and I hope to be inspired. I hope that my senses will be delighted by the sights and smells of colourful, fresh fruits of the earth that I will want to irresistibly seize and rush home in order to whizz up something simple, fresh and delicious.

I see a box stacked with avocados, but when I get near I see they are black-flecked, fungus-ridden and bruised because they haven't been properly transported and stored.

'Perhaps I'll do a ratatouille,' I muse, but when I find the aubergines, they are brown and rotting and there are little fruit flies hovering silently around and I have a sense of deja-vu. Isn't this what happened last time I found myself in this awful place? Then, I had spotted a manager-type person and called him over to show him the rotting display, saying something suitably indignant about the disgrace of it.

'Oh,' he replied vacantly, not in the least embarrassed, shrugging his shoulders and adding insult to injury, repeating the wretched mantra of all irresponsible traders, 'No one else has complained!' This time I don't complain either. Quickly trying to compose some alternative recipe in my head, I think of leek and potato soup, that's easy, but the leeks are bagged and therefore slimy and brown-wilted.

Gosh, I'd love some strawberries, I wonder have they any fresh ones? I glide towards the table piled with plastic tubs of fruits, but when I pick one up and turn it over, I spy a mouldy fuzz, yuk! The tubs of raspberries beside them aren't mouldy, but they are seeping their crimson juices and not firm and fresh as they should be.

'Forget it,' I think. 'I'll just pick up a bag of frozen peas and fling them into some pasta, maybe with some nice crusty garlic bread.' I find the garlic and the peas and even a tray of non-rotting tomatoes.But are they irradiated, or genetically engineered to contain genes that belong to a fish? Too tired to even think this out in my head, in my zombie-like state, I've forgotten how you can tell!

Now, all I need is the bread. Ah! Bread---that most elusive of things to look for in a supermarket! Instead of real bread, there are just the usual varieties of sawdust!

Who would have thought there were so many ways of making lousy bread, imitating the real thing, but without a list of ingredients for me to check and of such bad quality that the rolls are already rock-hard.

Anyway, the shelf looks more like a rubbish tip, with discarded bags and other unwanted loaves that customers have left there and all of a sudden, I don't realy feel like buying bread anymore. I think this stuff is an insult to customers, but with no choice, I root for a few rolls from the bottom of the pile, hoping no one has plonked their handbag on them, but I don't feel enthused about what I am going to cook this evening.

The place is draining me and I want to get out. I'm wasting my time here. I don't even feel like eating anymore, just want to get home.



Remember, healthy eating is enjoyable!

Blessings on your table!

The Good Food Angel

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