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Drama Queen for a Day
Slim and grim: Drama Queen's favorite terrible diets

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Mamafesto
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Why it's time
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LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET | PAGE 1, 2
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Sometimes I go in the opposite direction, to one of the small Asian markets around my neighborhood -- dusty, crowded places with dim fluorescent lights, where I hear staccato tonal language and have difficulty making eye contact. Here I can buy big green papayas the color of spring leaves; long, skinny, green beans; elegant stacks of fresh lemon-grass; long, lavender Japanese eggplants. The meat counters are marked in script I can't read and filled with cuts of flesh I don't recognize: whole fish, squid parts, tubs of pig ears and another of chicken feet. Among the canned corn and beans and soy sauce are canned lotus shoots, chili paste, bags of pearl barley, bags of dried mushrooms and flat sheets of dried cuttlefish and transparent noodles fine as hair. In the middle of it all I find an ancient jar of Lady's Choice Tuna Spread.

Not long ago, I was in a strange part of town on an errand with my daughter, and she asked if we could bake cookies in the evening. Sure, I said, but we need a few things. So I did something I hadn't done in a long time and went for groceries at one of the giant warehouse stores that dot the new urban landscapes. This is not one of the Costco or Wal-Mart varieties. I never go there -- I can't bring myself to enter that world of outsized shopping carts and Brobdingnagian aisles under chittering lights, to buy giant cans, giant boxes, whole cases of cans and boxes, to make a deal. In such places I sense a hypnotic urge to get a deal, make a killing, beat an imagined system that is somehow not represented by the huge store in which one shops, a mania to acquire.

No, this other store is urban, central, part of a huge national chain, and much more middlebrow and aesthetically creative than Costco. It's shiny and new and clearly retail, and sells immense variety far more than price. This is the dream of one-stop shopping, where you can buy rubber cement, gold jewelry, bath towels, shampoo, plumbing fixtures, sanitary pads, microwave ovens, clothes, prescription drugs, telephones, toys, take-out meals and tons of groceries. This is where everyone goes, it seems, because wherever it opens, the little hardware stores and shops gradually disappear.

In this two-story square-block building, all echoing ceilings and bright surfaces, rows of everything you could want march up and down in vanishing sight lines. Too much, so much, too much. That day, we walked, hungry, up and down and back and forth in the sickly light, in a crowd of people who seemed just as lost. And in the harsh glare, everything I saw in the cornucopia of our blessed lives looked awful. I felt a chasm of despair open up and myself sliding in, into an acute sense of failure, of having made the wrong turn for years. I felt a terrible grief, in fact, as though I was standing by an open grave watching my beloved put to ground, holding a frozen pizza in my hand, blinking back tears. Suddenly it was appalling -- appalling to an existential degree, an appalling moment at an appalling time in a long human history of excess and hunger and need. This is the future we have been careening toward, slouching toward, buying for ourselves -- this world of too much and nothing good enough, this future foisted upon us and paid for dearly.

The day passed. The next day, I returned to my small, ordinary neighborhood grocery store with relief, and the day after that I read that it had been sold to a speculating national chain of cut-rate warehouse pharmacies. Most of the chain will close in a few weeks and become something else, something less familiar. Less mismatched. I don't know what I will do, but today I'll go shopping there again and try to untangle fact from wish.
SALON | March 11, 1999

Sallie Tisdale's Second Thoughts column appears in Salon every other Thursday.

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