Grocery Update #142: I Don’t Want To Eat Like My Grandparents.

A Brief, Intergenerational Grocery Manifesto.

I Don’t Want To Eat Like My Grandparents.

By Errol Schweizer

1. I don’t want to eat like my grandparents.

That’s about as far back as I can go.

Not rooted in the land, no trendy atavism, no MAGA hipster trad-wife pastoralism in this family tree. Nope. My paternal grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, four years in Auschwitz and Matthausen after her family was ethnically cleansed from a town in eastern Hungary where they had been migrant laborers, barely citizens, barely tolerated, until they were displaced and exterminated.

She didn’t talk much about those years, we can’t imagine what she went through or how she survived when sixty four of her family members perished in the ovens. No back to the land nostalgia, no blood and soil. Just loss, and intergenerational trauma, everything lost in the fires of Auschwitz and World War Two.

My paternal grandparents survived Hitler and the war, they ate shit, insects and dirt. I don’t want to eat like my grandparents did. And then they were resettled here after the war, and settled into a working class New York life, my grandma a baker with the grocery union, my grandpa mostly on disability after owning a few corner stores that kept getting the shake downs from the Irish mob, but that’s another story (with grocery in the blood). They wanted us to eat well, with love.

2. That’s where my parents picked up the baton.

Capitalist modernity, Reagonomics, The Eighties, just like the Killing Joke song. Industrial food, industrial society, at its fragile peak. Cheap, convenient, abundant. Locally owned supermarkets with unionized staff, Korean green grocer fruit stands with produce spilling out onto the sidewalks, Dominican and Puerto Rican bodegas and their bodega cats chasing off rats, dog shit on the sidewalk, plenty of food, stacked high, cheap and bountiful. Home sweet home.

Chicken soup, meatloaf, white rice, white bread and white potatoes, overcooked broccoli or spinach, canned corn, peas and carrots, tuna salad, wilted iceberg lettuce, mealy apples, Hydrox, Little Debbies and Turkey Hill ice cream, cold cereal and milk for breakfast that always left me phlegmy and constipated. Pizza after school, New York slices, best in the world, washed down with a Snapple. Saturday night Chinese food, AKA, safe Treif. Fast food once in a while if we were desperate. No TV dinners, never.

My parents did their best. They kept us well fed. But I don’t want to eat like my parents (except for pizza and Chinese food, NYC forever).

3. And once I got the chance, I didn’t. But that took a while.

When I transferred to school upstate to study Biology, I got a job in the dining hall. Making sandwiches, washing dishes in the big industrial washer, dishing lunch tray slop, grilling burgers, slinging industrial mass produced food for my fellow students, working alongside work study students, hair net lunch ladies, halfway house ex-cons. I got bored with scraping the grease pits and smelling like rancid oil, splashed with brown dishwasher effluent, the overcooked greens and borderline cold cuts at the dining halls, and soon started working some hours at the campus food co-op.

The food co-op, a grungy, funky smelling hub of Gen X 90’s counterculture, run by a barely coherent community of punks, hippies and burn-outs, with fresh tofu, soy burgers, Amy’s burritos, dried beans, bulk herbs, soy milk and locally grown wilted greens, all very exciting for a recently converted vegan. I learned to cook a little, but mostly ate mass produced, minimally processed Amy’s burritos and pounded quarts of vanilla Edensoy, at least until Silk came out in 1996. At least I was no longer phlegmy and constipated.

Our co-op deliveries came on Sundays, from Northeast Co-ops, before they were devoured by UNFI. Still industrial food, delivered on a 54 foot diesel truck, wrapped in shrink wrap, boxed in corrugated cardboard, produced for all the other co-ops and counterculture stores trying to re-think how to grow, make, distribute food. Just a different flavor of industry, organic, whole grain, vegetarian, usually enjoyable. It stuck with me.

A few years later, after bouncing in and out of a dozen or so different jobs, my ever patient and understanding wife, encouraged me to get a job at Whole Foods. To my wary Bronx provincial eyes, it seemed a bit fancy, but the staff were friendly, it smelled good and the food seemed fresh. We had just had a kid and Whole Foods was reputed to pay well and give good benefits, this being way back in 2002 or so. The rest is history.

I still don’t want to eat like my grandparents, or parents. And I am fortunate enough that I no longer had to.

4. And I don’t mind eating like my kids.

My kids were pretty fortunate. They grew up in a household with enough income to eat healthy food, buoyed by two stable jobs and an 20% employee discount. They went out to eat sometimes and were lucky to eat plenty of home cooked meals. Their dad’s job had a big perk too, lots of samples from the office. They got to try food from all over the world, snacks and sauces and olive oils and pickles and spices and even some treats, when their mom let them. Most of what they grew up eating was fresh and organic, even sometimes homegrown or from the farmers market, and they ate lots of plant-based proteins, lots of beans, lentils, nuts and seeds. Fresh, ubiquitous, abundant. A different flavor of industrial food.

And they loved food.

And when they were diagnosed with various food allergies and sensitivities, peanuts, soy, wheat, gluten, they had access to a world of alternatives and rarely missed out on the normal things kids love, like ice cream, nut butter and jelly sandwiches or spaghetti dinners.

They benefitted from the fact that a large scale, efficient, abundant, natural and specialty grocery sector had been built by tens of thousands of workers like their dad, through cold storage and logistics, farm to shelf supply chains, aggressive store and market development pipelines, cooperative farmer, retailer and wholesaler networks, inventory management and long term production forecasting, product development and iterative innovation between brand managers and retail buyers, promotional events and customer-focused category management.

My first week on the job. After training me on how to face, front, stock shelves, stack pallets and break down and bail up cardboard boxes, my humble colleague, grocery lifer Howard Schwartz, gave me my marching orders, “We’re here to feed the people.” It was not what I was expecting.

And so, that’s what we did. No one carrying Omnivore’s Dilemma like a crunchy Red Book, just an industry of Dickies-wearing, boxcutter wielding, forklift driving, pallet stacking Howard Schwartzes. Here to feed the people.

This different flavor of industry took decades for all of us to build, driven by the increasing demand for healthier, more sustainably foods, but also the insatiable demand for food that was tasty, nutritious and enjoyable, in spite of most food on shelf dominated by a handful of packaged food brands, built on 200 million acres of genetically modified corn, soy, canola and alfalfa for animal feed, ethanol and the processed ingredients found in 75%+ of packaged foods, engineered to withstand herbicides, or built with pesticides in their genome, bug spray you can’t wash off, ever. The status quo, cheap, convenient and abundant, until six years of supply chain disruptions, price inflation and record profiteering enabled by market concentration drove prices up by over 30, 40, 50%.

The good kind of processed food, some of it even made via values-based procurement, which science is now saying is actually better for you, sustained by a workforce across farming, manufacturing, wholesale, retail and logistics who still deserve union protections, better wages and benefits and job security than their getting, now accounting for roughly $100 billion in sales, growing faster than the rest of the mess.

My kids were very lucky to be on the consumption end of this alternative industrial supply chain.

I’d like to keep eating like my kids, with love and joy (and employee discounts).

5. But I don’t know if I want to eat like my grandkids.

That is…

My kids are grown, but they don’t have kids, yet.

I’m anxious for my grandkids’ generation, and not just for what they will eat.

Between perpetual food inflation, climate change and weather related disasters, war, ethnic nationalism, data centers, AI, economic turmoil and a ruling class of sex trafficking pedophile billionaires, it’s hard to be optimistic.

There is one path, where factory farmed meats, herbicide and pesticide drenched produce and genetically modified grains, forced labor farmwork and low paid, expendable supply chain work maintains and worsens the status quo while food monopolies rake in ever higher profits for a small handful of shareholders, in the midst of increasing climate chaos, war and economic uncertainty.

And as the good food my kids were so lucky to grow up with becomes more and more expensive and elitist, especially with price inflation and without those generous employee discounts, but also because nutrition subsidies like SNAP and WIC become more and more rare and federal programs just subsidize incumbent commodity farmers. Food insecurity is the norm. Obesity, chronic disease more and more prevalent. This is the path we are on.

There is another path, more ecological but technologically optimistic, highly efficient future food for the masses, where genetic modification is repurposed for highly productive, climatically resilient, nutrient dense foods, where the vast abattoirs are replaced with an archipelago of vat grown meat factories after researchers figure out how to actually scale it sustainably, where CAFO milk and cheese is replaced by synthetic biological products excreted from genetically modified microorganisms, after researchers figure out if the critters are producing foodstuffs that can be digested and metabolized, and whether or not all this new silver bullet science isn’t producing new unforeseen consequences that the rush to market and sense of urgency driven by investors’ needs to generate huge profits will likely incur.

George Jetson via Impossible Burgers, fully automated luxury capitalism or socially conscious Prometheus unbound? Who am I to burst the bubble?

Or a third path, far too optimistic, but wholly worth working for, where food is grown and produced by a well-treated and well-compensated workforce, where manufacturing and industry is modernized, efficient, appropriate scale, regionalized and decentralized, food grown and made closer to points of consumption, not so dependent on California or Florida and their inherent, inevitable disasters, an industry where values based procurement is now the baseline for institutional and enterprise supply chains, where toxic pesticides and herbicides are used only as a last resort, where our insane dependence on large scale, climate destroying animal agriculture is ratcheted back and replaced with a more biodiverse, plant-forward and climatically appropriate cuisine, where the government stops subsidizing corn for feed and ethanol and where subsidies are reprioritized to ensure all the folks in my grandkid’s generation have enough tasty, nutritious, good and healthy food, while underwriting seed innovation, product development and manufacturing for the public sector to ensure the best stuff is available to all.

Good food as an inalienable human right. That should be the purpose of industry. Here to feed the people.

It’s going to take a lot to get there, and I doubt it will be that cut and dry.

At best, likely a combination of all three futures, conflicting goals and outcomes feeding off of each other to build a future none of us can really predict and anticipate.

It’s all so dicey.

But thousands of clerks, cashiers, the Howard Schwartzes of the world -here to feed the people- the buyers, the brand managers and the farm, logistics, warehouse and food processing workers, making sure we don’t have to eat like my grandparents, and neither do my kids. And hopefully, if we keep at it, neither will their kids.

And that’s just how my grandparents would want it. RIP.

peace.

(Perspectives 100% our own and do not reflect sponsors.)