I’ve always enjoyed the grocery store ever since I was a little kid. I don’t know exactly what it is about a supermarket, but there’s something comforting there.

In the summertime, it feels nice to walk into the cool store and escape the heat outside. In the Fall, it’s filled with seasonal smells and foods that you might not buy again until next year, like those crispy onions you put on green bean casserole and candy and other goodies that you can purchase year-round, but in the Fall, dress up for the holidays to bully you into buying them with fear of missing out on the unique, limited edition packaging; black and orange through October. Brown and orange through November, then in December, everything goes red and green. And then, just after the silver, black, and gold New Year’s decorations go on clearance, everything becomes pink and red a month too soon. It’s like clockwork. You can rely on it. I suppose that’s what’s comforting—the routine.

The Routine of the Grocery Store

As a kid, I enjoyed that routine. Every week, we’d park, get a cart, go inside, walk down the same aisles, and pick out the same foods: sandwich bread, bologna, pudding pops, cereal; always meandering through the same loop around the store, we’d grab a sample if they had them, and then check out. 

At almost every single register was a familiar face. Each cashier had the number of years they had worked for the grocery store printed on their name tag, and I always looked to see how many years they had been working there. Anything over five years was unfathomable to my young mind. As I grew up, the same faces were still at the registers. The numbers on their name tags were getting big, their hair was getting a little grayer, and their faces were beginning to betray their age.

They were a lot like teachers when I was young. I wondered who they were, what else they did, if anything, or did they just live in the grocery store. I never saw any of them outside the store. Come to think of it, I never see them outside the store now, either. It seems elitist and wrong. It’s an indictment of suburban homogeny distilling our neighborhoods into socioeconomically segregated islands the help can’t afford to live on. So, interactions with people above and below your own social status are limited to business transactions like checking out at the supermarket. 

The Supermarket Sweeps Away Your Cares

After checking out one time when I was about 7, I was pushing the cart as we were walking away from the check stand, and I ran over the back of my mom’s heel with the front of the cart. Not on purpose, but because I had the spatial awareness and attention span of a 7-year-old. She turned around and smacked me across the face in front of a dozen or so unfazed customers and cashiers. And yet, even after that totally unfair and unjustified moment of public humiliation, the grocery store remains a fixture in my mind of good memories and warm fuzzies that come and go with the seasons.

There For Us Even In Hard Times

Every week, every month, every season, every year. The grocery store is there; the routine is there. And it’s a very privileged thing, isn’t it? It’s a sign that you have a minimum level of wealth and status, but whoever stops to think about that?

When the shelves were bare in March and April, I didn’t hear anybody saying that they were grateful that the grocery stores were still open and that they were able to continue to buy food to feed their families. They just complained about what wasn’t on the shelves. Nobody had to resort to hunting the neighborhood squirrels. Even in an unprecedented time of crisis, the grocery store was still there for us in a significant way. Sure, our routine was interrupted, but it wasn’t lost. It was temporarily altered. We couldn’t buy all of the things we are used to buying, and that can be a stressful thing when we rely on our routines of consumption to comfort and soothe our troubled minds. It forces us out of our comfort zone when we must make even a small change to our routine.

That’s why diets don’t work.

They replace the most fundamental routine of our day with new foods that don’t work to comfort us. Then, when tensions rise, we retreat back to our old ways. Routine 1 – Diet 0.

Henry David Thoreau warned us to “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” I say beware of all diets that require new food. Not that I have anything against trying new things. But temporarily changing the food you eat will not change YOU. Sure, I’ve cut things out of my diet for extended periods of time; Sugar, alcohol, dairy, but it’s never for very long. They always come back because, like Jerry Seinfeld said, “a diet is what you eat, not something you do.”

Diet Dogma

We all know the meat and potatoes guy who wouldn’t be caught dead eating a vegetable lest anyone think he was less than a man. He’s not on the manly meat and potatoes diet; he just has a limited palate. Everyone knows a vegan who would never eat any animal products, but that’s considered a lifestyle, not a diet. I would never eat that fermented shark they consider a delicacy in Iceland, but you wouldn’t say I’m on the no rotten shark diet. I even know someone who claims that they can’t eat a salad because of a GI disorder, but they drink Dr. Pepper by the gallon. Are they on the Dr. Pepper diet? No, they just have a touch of Munchausen.

A diet is what you eat, not something you do. And, at least, in Western society, what we eat has somehow become entangled with our identity. We cling dogmatically to our diets, sometimes to the detriment of our own health, which is why the only diet that works, the only diet that will actually stick, is to make a complete lifestyle change. 

I didn’t know it while we were following the path we’ve spent the past 20 years wearing into the floor of our local grocery store, but that’s exactly what I was about to do.