The pros & cons of supermarkets

[novapsyche]

This is a strange topic/debate, I realize; please bear with me.

Since I've come into a serious philosophical state of mind, it has occurred to me that modern life and all that comes with it simply serves to remove us more and more from the skills that made human evolution a success up until now. We have lost the ability to work crafts and perform tasks that truly involve skill. Who makes their own clothes anymore? Hell, who even works on their own vehicles anymore? We've bought into a system that provides all of these "services" for us now.

Along this line of thought, I'd often propounded that supermarkets deprive us of a natural link and affinity for the soil. Few people (at least in this country) know how to farm. This is an amazing fact, since 150 years ago this country was 91% agrarian. We have become dependent on convenience shopping. We have no true connection with food; our relationship with it has become highly artificial.

Then I recently read a study that showed that certain segments of the population actually eat better and have higher nutrition due to the fact that they get their food from supermarkets. Specifically, poorer people have higher access to fresh fruit, which supplements their diets and consequently betters their health.

Learning this has forced me into the position of having to modify my position, but I'm at the point where I'm not sure where I stand. I still feel that the supermarket system (along with many other facets of Western culture) has served to tacitly imprison us in a capitalistic market, for without them many Americans would have nowhere to get their food and no skills by which to produce their own.

Comments

[myelectricsheep.livejournal.com]

From the point of view of religious practice, I don't know that any of this is a problem. If you make your entire life your practice, this need not be a perfect world, or even a semi-perfect world. That is, I may not see this world as perfect in any way other than, this world is a perfect place to learn, but that is enough. More than enough, that is utterly perfect!

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Supermarkets have also contributed significantly to the "epidemic of obesity" by encouraging a diet of inexpensive starchy foods, foods with refined sugar or enriched bleached wheat flour, and foods high in saturated fats.

[badsede.livejournal.com]

Here's an interesting thought .. When you do go to the supermarket, which part do you spend most of your time in. I think this reveals some interesting things about people.

When you think about it, the whole foods are almost all around the perimeter: produce, milks and cheeses, whole juices, eggs, meat, poultry and fish, even bread. The canned, pre-processed, more starchy, preservative, sugared items are in the aisles. It's not absolute, but in general it holds true.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

*nod*

Every so often it strikes me that there are whole sections of the supermarket I don't even go through, much less buy anything out of. All the sweet pastries, the frozen dinners, the preprepared meal stuff, (for the most part), and there are whole segments of food we almost never touch. I usually do that perimeter walk and then check out, possibly with some forays into the aisles to get canned soups and tomatos, pasta, tuna fish, peanut butter, and juice.

Oh, and we visit the baking aisle pretty often.

I was visiting my grandmother for lunch today and she was telling me about how they stopped making their own ice cream, not because of the time it took or any inconvenience particularly, but because eventually the premade stuff started being less expensive than doing it yourself.

But still, I know people who make their own yogurt. I grow my own vegetables, though not all of them. And I support how grocery stores can introduce a person to food types or vegetables they haven't used before.

Interesting rant on supermarkets

[mesila.livejournal.com]

Check out this page...
http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/slaves.htm

The only "con" to fruit stands (I live in the inner city where it's harder to get to a supermarket than to a likka sto' or a fruit stand) is that I get a little nervous about things like insect larvae in fruit (some of them can apparently live in one's stomach and intestines and cause all sorts of hell) and poisonings by passersby, though that could happen in a supermarket too, the security is probably better. I do get nervous about the pesticides on the supermarket fruit, though, so it's six of one half a dozen of the other, ya know...