The supermarket is one of the strangest and most powerful inventions in human history.
Grocery shopping is often perceived as a simple, mundane activity. And for many, access to food has never been more effortless. But supermarkets hold far more power than we realize. The journey our groceries take to reach the shelves touches every part of our lives – from our health, to our culture, to the environment. In this episode of Human Footprint, Shane Campbell-Staton embarks on a global investigation into the supermarket’s origins, revealing how they transformed the world and grappling with what the future may bring. He explores how innovations in food production, packaging, transportation, advertising, and retail design revolutionized how we buy our food.
Today, supermarkets offer endless choices and low prices, but behind the shelves lies a darker truth. In pursuit of efficiency, we’ve surrendered control of our food system to vast corporations, promoted global supply chains that hide labor and environmental abuses, and flooded our diets with ultra-processed foods. Shane travels from surreal supermarket art installations to apple orchards, commercial film sets, shrimp farms, urban food co-ops, and beyond, connecting with people whose lives are intertwined with this system. What he uncovers is a complex story of the modern grocery store, the true cost of convenience, and the urgent need to reimagine the way we feed ourselves[.]I first encountered the story of the supermarket in Stuffed and Starved, one of the textbooks my co-instructor and I chose for Global Politics of Food, the course we taught when I started this blog. Here's what I wrote then.
[T]here is a lot wrong with the international food system, some of which is contributing to global collapse and much of which won't survive collapse, either, such as the long supply lines and heavy use of fossil fuels. In this book, Raj Patel gives a piercing critique of the way global capitalism shapes what humans grow and eat, exposing many of the flaws in the food system that contribute to collapse and what can be done about it. It's also an entertaining and informative read and Raj Patel is a charming and compelling person who knows his gin.Yes, I know Raj Patel, and I was pleased to see that Shane Campbell-Staton interviewed him for this episode. It really wouldn't have been complete without him.
I'm also pleased that this episode told the backstory to the rivalry between Kellogg's and Post satirized in Emmy nominee and double Razzie winner Unfrosted. That movie wasn't as stupid as it first seemed.
The most appalling thing I learned from this video was about shrimp. The TED-Ed video I embedded as the second video in Whales and fish, two stories I tell my students mentioned the environmental effects of shrimp farming on mangrove swamps and other coastlines, but it didn't include how shrimp farming contributed to depleting other fisheries and resulted in enslaved fishing crews. I know I write that "it's always a good day when I learn something new," and both of those were new to me when I first watched this, but both of them are terrible facts to learn about farm-raised shrimp, enough to make me not want to eat "America's most popular seafood." The problem is that it's not just shrimp, it's throughout the supply chains of dozens of foodstuffs, including coffee. It looks like Trafficked: Underworlds with Mariana van Zeller has lots of material still to cover.*
All of the above serve as examples of two of Commoner's Laws: "There is no free lunch" and "Everything is connected to everything else." Maybe the rest of the episode goes into the waste created by the food system as an example of "Everything must go somewhere (There is no away)," the emphasis of the last time I referenced Commoner's Laws. Instead, Dr. Campbell-Staton concludes with an example of "Nature knows best" in the Detroit People's Food Co-op. I'm glad to see a happy ending from Detroit.
*Trafficked: Underworlds with Mariana van Zeller won four Emmy Awards, although not the ones I covered in 'The Dirty Business of Monkey Laundering' and 'Apes,' two nominees at the News & Doc Emmy Awards for World Rainforest Day. I plan on writing about its awards later this month. Stay tuned.
