Children at Checkout

It is a trope of many intellectuals that to stack shelves in a supermarket, or to work at a supermarket checkout, is the worst fate that can befall a human being. Such a job is regarded as the very epitome of dead-endedness, though a dead end is what we are all progressing toward anyway, and many people do not particularly want excitement on the way to that inevitable dead end. They want peace and tranquility instead: As some of my patients used to ask, “Can’t you give me something to stop me thinking, doctor?” It was not any particular thoughts that they wanted to cease to think: It was thought as such.

Be that as it may, there is interest to be found in supermarkets, for example in people’s choice of comestibles. I often look at what people buy and am appalled. It is almost as if they trusted nothing that had not been processed in a hundred factories and added to by a thousand chemicals. What they eat is natural only in the sense that everything that exists is natural. The products they choose may be given names suggestive of pastures, meadows, flowers, mountain ranges, and so forth, but the list of contents in microscopic letters on the back reads like an advanced textbook of chemistry, organic and inorganic. But at least all the purchasers have to do to prepare the stuff is to heat it up, which is about as far as their culinary skills extend.

You can tell the social class of people by simply looking at what they buy. Partly, of course, it is a question of money, but only partly. The higher the proportion of fresh food chosen, the higher the social class. As for alcoholics, they buy edibles as if eating were a regrettable necessity and rather a waste of money. They buy as little and as cheaply as possible: They do not want to eat into their drinking money. It is as if they knew dietary recommendations perfectly and had decided to do as near the opposite as they could. Dostoyevsky said that if a perfectly benevolent and well-intentioned government existed (a wildly unlikely hypothesis), people would do the opposite of its injunctions merely to exercise their freedom. Fortunately, no such government is necessary to prove the determination of people not to follow good advice—which, as La Rochefoucauld pointed out, is in any case easier to give than to take. American Tragedy: Kenn... Kaiser, David Best Price: $5.36 Buy New $17.68 (as of 05:57 UTC - Details)

If I were to work at a supermarket checkout—another kind of employment that will soon disappear—I am sure that I should find it very difficult to refrain from commentary on the customers’ purchases. “How can you buy this disgusting rubbish?” I would ask. “It isn’t even cheap, contrary to what you suppose.”

Nowadays, people are prepared to eat cakes with sky-blue icing, or sky-blue ice cream. Fifty-five years ago I held a dinner party at which I dyed potatoes either red or blue, my hypothesis being that my guests would be prepared to eat the red potatoes but not the blue: red being a possible color for a natural food but blue being obviously artificial. And so it turned out: People (of my own age) would eat the red but not the blue potatoes.

It would be interesting to repeat the experiment today. It might well be that people are now so disconnected from nature, and so accustomed to the artificial, that they would be prepared to eat blue potatoes.

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