Looking for Love (Seasonal Produce) in all the Wrong Places (the Supermarket)
Don't lie to me, Raley's
Today, my problem is with liars. Considering it's Valentine's Day, this could be a screed about untrue lovers, but more often, it's the supermarket selling me falsehoods.
Standing in the produce section at Basha's (owned by Raley's) last week, I had an hour to shop. I was at a new-to-me location, and while my five-year-old darted around the potatoes, I took in the signs atop the perimeter telling me sweet nothings: Locally sourced. Farm to Market. In Season Special. I walked the length, noting that on each price card, there was also the provenance of the item on the lower left: USA. Mexico. Mexico. Mexico. USA. USA. I don't know what's more local. Mexico is a lot closer to me than a lot of the rest of the US. The only item I could find from my home state was the basket of Arizona pinto beans, ninety-nine cents/lb.
Perhaps the Locally sourced sign only referred to the beans.
It was hard to tell what the In Season Specials were, because there was the same produce display as usual. The waxen apples, bananas, and citrus. The wan potatoes and cabbages. The preternaturally red strawberries. The small truckload of lettuce encased in layers of plastic. I'm sure there's an internal list of what must be on sale at all times at supermarkets, and by God, it's there—rain or shine, season or no season. If this strikes one as desperate and grasping—rather than abundant—that's because it is, as well as destructive.
To shop in the produce section at a supermarket is to enter one long season that's gaslit. There are the old standards, the fruits that the general US population must never be without. And then there's something else, displayed with signage denoting its special status, but that isn't seasonally appropriate for the region. Often pineapple, mango, or kiwi. Perhaps pineapple is in season in Indonesia, the top producer. Am I shopping seasonally if it's another country's season I'm enjoying?
As a kid shopping in rural northern Nevada, urban northeastern Pennsylvania, or suburban Arizona, my mom would send me to get a bag or two of whatever fruit was under a dollar a pound. Now I ask my kid to get a bag of whatever fruit is $1.99/lb or less. That's how I learned about seasonality. "Whatever's cheapest is in season," was the thinking. But, back then and now it's bananas, apples, potatoes, onions, cabbage, whatever month or location. This is the industrial food system at work, flattening everything in its wake.
Is it possible to shop seasonally at a grocery store whose entire purpose is to sell sameness?
Every year, I almost buy a seasonal produce poster to hang in my kitchen as I eat sad industrial vegetables. Those posters are hand printed, or letterpressed, on recycled handmade paper, by a local artisan who wants to show off the bounty of local, seasonal produce. These beautiful posters are sometimes used as illustrations in articles encouraging the public to Eat Seasonally And Locally (sponsored by Kroger or WalMart.) The radical heart of localizing my diet gets shot through with arrows from the greedy supermarkets who now, after making their money being Big and Uniform, want me to believe that they're just a humble lil farmstand full to the brim with carrots grown down the road by Pa and Ma.
Lies!
Standing at the checkout, the worker's face went blank while they thumbed through the item booklet. They held out a root they didn't recognize and asked me what it was. "A parsnip," I said, feeling slightly bad. I hadn't grabbed one with a sticker affixed to it for easier scanning. My stomach turned over. I want everyone in that store to be well acquainted with the parsnip! The grocery store should be a place where people know and love vegetables. Above us, the satisfied faces of the family who founded the store—once it was an actual mom-and-pop place—looked down, surveying their wealth, ignoring the parsnip.
The desire to eat seasonally and locally is good, and it's in all of us as we shop and feed ourselves the best we can. Humans are complex beings, noticing patterns, and our subconscious is always working away at things. Eating a piece of fruit in (local) season means something different—often because the shopping experience occurs outside the industrial supermarket. An object of beauty, like the seasonal produce calendar, can be a reminder and source of encouragement: Words like "local" and "seasonal" mean something specific, damnit!
And to the grocery stores that use "seasonal" and "local" as marketing tactics without delivering on the promise, you're not fooling anyone. Calling lettuce local when it's simply grown in the country in which I live is not local. Calling lettuce local when it is grown in Arizona but on an industrial farm that abuses its workers is misleading. Running ads about what's new this season when selling a destructively unchanging array of produce, is manipulative. I can see right through it, and I'm telling everyone I know.
It's a depressing winter in Arizona. It's warm early, thanks to climate change (which also means spring allergies are already here.) The new administration is wreaking havoc on the trans, queer, chronically ill, and immigrant communities in my town. The local produce is from a thousand miles away. I'm watching revisionist history in real time as words and their meanings are erased.
It's a winter of the soul—in the produce section, too.
The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays, interviews, and shorter updates. I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks.
devin! this was so great to read… and definitely has enraged me and motivated me this morning, too! i think the only time i’ve ever come across an actual seasonal big supermarket was in winnipeg, and that was only because the weather was too bad in winter to deliver any produce from outside manitoba ahah. but the visual of a near empty, local only supermarket always stuck with me from that.
Well-captured oft-shared sentiment for reluctant supermarket goers. Gaslit's double use is fun in your one-liner. Of all of your writing, I perhaps enjoy reading your diatribes most. Or maybe I was just really ready to shake my fist at the bananas on a day when so many problems are competing for the attention of a fist-shaking. Thank you.