Your friendly neighborhood supermarket

Saturday

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It would be fair to say that I know next to nothing about the grocery business. What I have to say about it, then, probably ought to be taken with a grain of salt (organic sea salt if possible). Nevertheless, as on many matters, I have an opinion.

If anyone had asked me twenty years ago if there was a niche in the supermarket business large enough to sustain several new franchises, I would have said “no” without hesitation. What with Safeway, Thriftway, Albertsons, Fred Meyer, and other chains, the grocery business seemed pretty saturated to me.

How wrong I was! For when I would have made this prediction, the original Nature’s was already beginning to expand. Nature’s began as your typical aging-Oregon-hippie grocery co-op. It grew, was sold to GNC, and was sold again to Wild Oats Markets Inc. Nature’s was followed by Wholefoods, New Seasons (run by Stan Amy, who was instrumental in the expansion of the original Nature’s stores), Zupans, and others.

All of these stores cater or catered to an upscale crowd willing to spend more on higher quality foods and organic foods–consumers seeking to follow the “pay more, eat less” mantra. Now every grocery store has organic foods, but there was a time in the not-too-distant past when a person had to search for organic foods, specialty items, and particular imports.

One could say that a new species of grocery retailer evolved to fill a niche that few realized existed, but the niche itself emerged and evolved. Species are always in a relation of co-evolution with their environments, and the environment of a grocery retailer consists, at least in part, of consumers (among other presences, such as competitors).

If a business as stodgy and apparently stagnated as groceries could suddenly flourish with a a half dozen new distribution channels, is any sector of the retail market immune from reinventing itself (creating new fortunes and destroying old ones in the process)? This ought to make one hopeful in even the most recessionary economy that new things are always possible, even when change seems unlikely.

I went to a New Seasons market last night. In many respects it was like many other supermarkets, but I did notice something quite striking. Few sensory experiences bring back more vivid memories than an intense scent. And while the store was sparklingly clean, I noticed that when I was near the fish counter I could smell the ocean as clearly and plainly as when, as a child, I accompanied my mother to the fish market on the Astoria waterfront, and when I entered the store, passing through the vestibule filled with flowers, I breathed deeply to draw in that incredible greenhouse scent. Such smells are transporting, and inevitably bring long-submerged memories to the surface–the perfect example of “involuntary memory” that figures so prominently in Proust.

In search of lost time: Marcel Proust would have approved of the involuntary memories evoked by the scents of New Seasons.

When a friend of mine first told me about the central theme of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu my first response was that my involuntary memories were all bad memories. It often happens to me that I spontaneously recall unpleasant episodes from the past. My friend was surprised by this assertion; it seemed never to have occurred to him that someone might have unwelcome involuntary memories. But my experience at New Seasons made me realize that I have a store of dormant memories not often brought to the surface.

Proust announces his theme of memory in the very first paragraph of Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann). The book is an intense and sustained meditation upon memory, and one can pick gems from the text at will:

“I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shews us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.”

(Overture, C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation)

Here “intellectual memory” serves as the opposite number of the involuntary memory that is focus of the work, and intellectual memory, Proust tells us, preserves nothing of the past itself. Presumably, then, involuntary memory does preserve something of the past itself. The past itself — what is this? A Kantian conception? A temporal noumenon? And what then of temporal phenomena (in contradistinction to temporal noumena)? Is this what is given to us by mere “intellectual memory”?

There are many photograph portraits of Proust posed like the paradigmatic thinker, with a distant look as though he were perpetually lost in memory.

All of these are worthwhile questions prompted by my own experience of involuntary memory, so that involuntary memory also becomes a springboard for involuntary cognition. I remember, and I begin to think about that which I remember: it is as much a reflex as the memory.

Another meditative, semi-recumbent portrait: Proust has mastered this pose.

There is a scene in the little-known Cary Grant film “People Will Talk” in which his character Dr. Noah Praetorius says something to the effect that there is no perfume like an old grocery store. (“…our American mania for sterile packages has removed the flavor from most of our foods… there was never a perfume like an old-time grocery store… Now they smell like drug stores”) The recent attention given to the slow food movement and to the emphasis upon local foods has had the effect of a “consciousness raising” for the grocery business. Probably many people have missed the sensuousness of food that was lost during the years of the sterile supermarket that came of age during the 1960s.

The attempt to live in accordance with the image of futurism and modernism that we take away from the early Space Age proved profoundly dissatisfying in some respects. I have have been in some recent Safeway stores (like the Safeway in Astoria near the East Mooring Basin that was built by Skip Hauke as an expansion of his older Sentry Market formerly on the other side of Highway 30) that actually have wooden floors. Grocery stores used to commonly have wooden floors before they began to fall in line with the steel-and-glass futurist modernity and remodeled with easily mopped and disinfected artificial materials. In what have been called the “canyons of processed foods” in the typical suburban grocery store, the foods sometimes seemed as artificial as the floors.

It is important to understand that the modernist aesthetic of steel and glass and concrete represented a certain ideal that, despite the disasters of the early twentieth century, retained its fascination if not its charms throughout the middle part of the twentieth century. There was an enthusiasm for the future that began with the futurist movement in the early twentieth century, which was violent and transgressive but at that time mostly poetic and conceptual, which slowly was transformed into many varieties of popular futurism that were less violent and transgressive in their symbols and imagines, but which represented a violent and transgressive transformation of society that was technological rather than poetic and concrete rather than conceptual.

The Jetsons represented one form of populist futurism.

The antiseptic supermarket that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century was in part a function ease of cleaning and economy of manufacture, but it was also about projecting an image, and it was an expression of a Weltanschauung of modernity and futurism. If everyone is building their supermarkets in steel and glass, with shining white floors and bright fluorescent lighting above, no one in the industry can afford to be the odd man out. If you built a wooden grocery store at a time when the public had different expectations, you would soon be out of business.

The architecture of the late twentieth century suburban supermarket was one expression of futurist modernity, and futurist modernity was one expression of the violent, transgressive modernity pioneered by the Italian futurists in their many manifestos. There is, in this tradition, a spectacular devalorization of the past that willfully rejects tradition in favor of modernity. The past is to be violently overthrown. By extension, the devalorization of the past is the devalorization of the memory that recalls the past. Memory, too, must be violently overthrown. Thus the futurist grocery store does not accidentally extirpate all fragrance of food; its very construction and operation is designed to annihilate both the history of the food, its connection to the natural world, and the cultural traditions of food. Traditions, including culinary traditions, must be overthrown in order to create the tabula rasa from which a new and modern culture can arise, and a new and modern culture will demand a new and modern cuisine, not the food and its fragrances dredged up from memory.

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