I was standing in the supermarket waiting on an invoice, which is a thing I do more often than I would like, and I started watching a lady and her companion.
They had bags on them. Either they were going back way for the day, because that supermarket sits near the ferry terminal, or they were heading down to the Grenadines for a stretch. And they had so many snacks.
Now there is nothing wrong with snacks. I want to say that first, because this is not that kind of piece. But I looked in the basket and it was those sandwich cookies, chips, Chex Mix. And I stood there thinking: when did convenience start to mean that, for something to be easy, it had to stop being food?
The part that should feel strange and doesn't
Here is what got me. It didn't look odd. Nobody in that shop turned a head. There is a whole aisle of it, and we walk past it the way you walk past furniture.
Some of it I can read. Potato chips, I know what those are. Plantain chips, peanuts, fine. But a lot of it you pick up, you turn it over, you read the ingredient list, and it runs the length of your hand. Michael Pollan called things like that edible foodlike substances, in a book called In Defense of Food, and I have been saying almost exactly that for years without knowing he had beaten me to it. It is a good phrase and he can have the credit.
The arithmetic nobody explains
Then the thing that actually keeps me up. If a product has that many ingredients — each one grown or made or refined somewhere, each one shipped, each one handled — how is it cheap?
And the reverse. A pepper has one ingredient. A pepper. And a pound of peppers here runs about $25 ECD ($9.23 USD). Broccoli, about $20 ECD ($7.38 USD) a pound. One ingredient, no factory, no packaging, no marketing budget, and it costs more than a box of something with a list on the side.
That is a whole twisted system, and it is not an accident. It is freight, subsidy, shelf life, and scale, all pointing the same direction. The thing built in a factory travels cheaply and keeps. The thing pulled out of the ground does not.
What I actually want to say to that lady
Not that she is doing it wrong. She is doing what the shop is designed to make easy, and she is going somewhere lovely, and I hope she had a beautiful week.
What I want is for easy and real to stop being opposites. That is the whole job, honestly. Not lecturing anybody about a cookie. Just making sure that when you want something quick, the quick option can also be actual food.
Because right now, on this island, quick and real is a thing you have to plan for. And that is backwards.
