quitting Whole Foods
I'm giving up supermarkets for the next month. Where will I buy my food? (I've got some good leads.) What will I learn? (Something, I hope.)
A few weeks ago, after reading the first chapter of Benjamin Lorr’s 2020 book “The Secret Life of Groceries," I had an idea. It was irrational and a potential time-suck, but it lodged itself in my brain and wouldn’t dissipate.
I wanted to quit the grocery store.
Not forever, and maybe not even for that long. But I had just bought a pile of shrimp at Whole Foods, and that opening chapter recounted a pungent horror story about deep cleaning day at the supermarket’s fish counter. My stomach turned and my mind raced, and a plan was born.
For the month of June, I’m giving up the grocery store. That means no Whole Foods, no Trader Joes, no Giant, no Safeway (no food shipments from Amazon, no bags of chips from CVS, no pints of ice cream from Walgreens). I’ll eat the supermarket food that’s already in my pantry, but anything new I buy will come from … somewhere else.
What? You have questions? I thought you might. The first might be HOW?! And that’s an easy one to answer: I live in a kind of grocery-shopping mecca. Besides my regular Whole Foods, I’m a 20-minute walk from Eastern Market, which D.C. tourists might know as a weekend farmer’s market where vendors also sell crafts, home decor and artwork. But inside the 19th-century brick building are multiple butchers, each with its own specialty, plus produce, dairy products, seafood, a bakery and more — and it’s open six days a week. Just as close to my house in the other direction is a massive food hall, complete with a family-owned butcher counter, a seafood stall and a produce vendor. There’s also a cheese shop a quick walk away, plus two independently-run convenience stores and another that’s part of a local chain. Oh, and for nine months out of the year, there’s a Saturday-morning farmer’s market approximately 300 steps from my front door.
So that’s how: I am privileged. I can get to a half-dozen or so great shops in a matter of minutes on foot. That puts me in a very lucky minority; according to the USDA, 88 percent of Americans drive their cars to buy groceries, and the average commute to the store is four miles. If I were traveling that far between stops to gather everything I needed to cook, this experiment would be doomed from the get-go.
So, then, WHY?! (Like, seriously, why on earth?) The truest, vaguest answer is that I’m on a long path toward grocery-shopping radicalization, and I’m not quite sure where it will leave me. Last year, I swore off all delivery services. I was tired of getting horseradish root when I ordered ginger, or bruised lemons, or a tragic pack of chicken thighs. I also wanted an excuse to get out of my house and away from my computer, so I imposed a second rule: Unless it’s pouring rain and I’m in desperate need of an ingredient, I’d get my groceries on foot. The amount of choice I have and the ease with which I can buy ingredients one day at a time has cut down on food waste and made cooking more fun. I never have to guess on a Monday what I might be craving on Thursday evening.
And those changes made me picky. Walking to the store and eliminating delivery broadened where I bought food, and after enough trips to the butcher at Eastern Market, it’s impossible not to be bummed about Whole Foods beef. After enough zucchini from the farmer’s market, the squash at Trader Joe’s is bound to taste watered-down. That’s not to say everything at the supermarket is worse or bad or wrong. I’m just finding a lot of good alternatives.
Near the beginning of “The Secret Life of Groceries,” Lorr tracks the journey of chicken from living thing to food to product, and he points out the misconception most consumers have when it comes to grocery shopping: We walk into a supermarket and see food, when really, we’re buying product. “An item within the grocery matrix loses its identity as food and becomes product,” Lorr writes. “It is liberated. … Now it is defined by the cubic inches of its packaging, its price per unit, and the velocity of its sales. It is not until much later, the moment the customer comes pushing their cart down the aisle and reaches out for that Styrofoam tray, that our chicken becomes food again.”
I’m curious if this experiment will make my groceries feel a bit more like food.
And I think I might draw a few concrete conclusions, stuff that’ll feel worth sharing here. You see, I’m not planning to quit supermarkets forever, and I doubt most people have the time or interest that would make them worth quitting for even a week. But as I remake my habits for a little while, I might pick up some new ones that will work once I’m back pushing a cart down an aisle of endless choices. I also suspect I’ll save some money, and maybe I’ll learn a thing or two about how to spend a bit less — or a bit smarter — on food. (FYI: From June 2023 through May 2024, I spent about $730 per month on groceries for my two-person household. Depending on what metrics you consult — and there are lots of them, some contradictory — that’s relatively reasonable for D.C., but it feels like a lot.)
So follow along. I’m going to keep reading “The Secret Life of Groceries” in an attempt to learn more about our modern food system while I temporarily scorn it. I’ll give periodic updates here on what I’m learning from the book and from my shopping adventures, and I’ll write a longer reflection at the end of the month. Do I have too much time on my hands? Maybe! Will I eat well? Absolutely.
When I watched the first season of HBO’s “Julia” a few years ago, I was most captivated by one character: Julia Child’s editor, Judith Jones. Not only did she seem like a fascinating lady, but I also felt like I’d heard her name before. Cue some Googling, and I realized why: Jones in 1949 was a young employee at Doubleday’s Paris office when she pulled “The Diary of a Young Girl” out of the slush pile, effectively starting the process that brought Anne Frank’s story to the world. Jones didn’t get to edit the book, but she did get plenty of later-in-life praise for her judgment, which changed the world of literature and had an impossible-to-quantify impact on how future generations understood the Holocaust. As Jones’s career progressed, she revolutionized food writing, championing and editing such writers and cooks as Child, Edna Lewis and M.F.K. Fisher, and a new book about her life and impact came out this week. For more on Jones, here’s a thought-provoking Q&A with the author of that biography:
I am a compulsive listener of podcasts, and I’m also a compulsive consumer of every word Ruth Reichl writes or utters, so I was thrilled to see her on the most recent episode of the “Everything Cookbooks” podcast. She talks a lot about her new novel, which is near the top of my to-read list, and you definitely don’t have to have read the book to follow the conversation.
Good luck with your current food journey 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
We live in the Hill and shop at Eastern Market for fresh meats, fish, fruit, bread, pasta and just about anything else you need and even those things you had no idea you needed! Happy foraging!