A Few Thoughts about Food Shopping Trends
Mar. 3rd, 2022 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutMy regular readers know what to expect when a subject line starts with “A Few Thoughts”. You’ve been warned. Why not just bail out now.
Still here? Why?!?! Buckle up, buttercup. It could be a bit of a ride.
Recently, I put together the Lego Globe. It was an _awesome_ build, but took a while and was somewhat repetitive. Thus, I listened to podcasts. I specifically went looking for Circular Economy podcasts. What does Circular Economy mean?
It’s like if your Buy Nothing group had a wild threesome with some WW2 Make It Do or Do Without and an overly optimistic, dare we say, rabid recycling group and this was the resulting … whatever. Don’t like that? Sure, it’s inappropriate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy
Enjoy.
Previous trends like Zero Waste, Reducing Food Waste, Eating Local, and ongoing trends like Sustainability all connect well to the Circular Economy theme, and all of them take their Material Culture focus and attempt to rehabilitate it by making claims about how this will reduce carbon. I’m skeptical. A lot of these things look like contemporary incarnations of that minority of humanity that insists on turning the lights off when you leave the room, independent of any thought about things like whether or not you are coming right back, or whether, for that matter, anyone is still in the room, or, heavens, whether or not the startup spike in power might wash out the savings from a short-term turning off of the lights.
It’s better to get rid of incandescents, than to make everyone turn the lights off when they leave the room. Reducing power consumption (and reducing heat production that then triggers greater air conditioning usage) _during use_ is a bigger deal than shaving a few percentage points off here and there in terms of how many minutes a day something is used.
But just because I’m skeptical of a trend is no indication of whether or not I will participate in the trend. Constraints are genuinely fun to play with, and can lead to solutions that I might not otherwise find in the vast wilderness of Free Choice. I’m not particularly anti-packaging, beyond finding it annoying around the holiday season when there’s so much of it that it’s difficult to get rid of without making a special trip to the transfer station (this, of course, refers to back in the day when we had waste pickup). You won’t ever see me taking pictures of the very tiny object in the inappropriately large box. Also, you won’t see me hoarding boxes; I pass those along to get turned into new boxes, altho if someone points me at an operation that recovers lightly used boxes for re-use pre-recycling into new cardboard, I _would absolutely_ collect and deliver our boxes to that operation. But even not being particularly anti-packaging, I could _see_ the strain on our collective system of distribution of the abrupt switch to online shopping and delivery of things once purchased in person in stores, and I tried to figure out ways to mitigate my contribution in the spirit of If Everyone Helps a Little We’ll Get Through This All Right.
I also didn’t really believe in any of the food waste propaganda. The sourcing on the statistics is … poor, and if you believe the general story, the correct solution needs to occur somewhere _other_ than in middle class households. But that didn’t stop me signing up for Imperfect Foods, when my sister was doing Misfit and talking it up constantly. Why not. Imperfect Foods wound up being a great product discovery mechanism for me, altho of course they’ve stopped using 3rd party shippers so I have no access anymore, which is also completely fine by me.
As a child, my family had a chest freezer (one of those old three compartment ones from the pre-frost free days) and we’d drive up to Skagit and buy a large fraction of a cow from John Peth and Sons and bring it home and put it in the freezer. I didn’t really realize that meat could come from the supermarket until some time later in my teens. I was perfectly fine with supermarket meat (sure, it’s worse than what I had as a child, and also worse than what I bought from various butchers over the years, but you know, whatever) and Costco meat, but for some reason that I’m still a little unclear on, I signed up with Walden Local early in 2020 (yeah, that worked out, right?). And while they stopped collecting their coolers, they did want us to save them and eventually they took them all back, which was delightful! Very low packaging! Local delivery! Super cool! So I signed up for Siena Farms in March of 2021. Even less packaging! Still local delivery (I could go pick it up myself, sure). Super cool! I learned a lot about a bunch of food I’d eaten at very expensive restaurants (I know, how weird is that, I eat my first celeriac for outrageous amounts of money in a restaurant; it’s incredibly cheap — if you can buy it at all).
Siena and Walden embody a whole bunch of trends: seasonality, local consumption, reduction in shipping, reduction in packaging, grocery delivery vs. in person shopping. Yes, Walden is _meat_, but it’s pasture, regenerative, organic, integrating animal husbandry with agriculture, yada yada yada. Supporting small scale farming. You know the drill. (Also, it is consistently on the same level as the meat of my childhood.) Siena is obviously all about the plants.
Anyway. I don’t necessarily actually believe in all this stuff. I really don’t. I’m very, very, very efficient in the kitchen, and I have an incredibly broad repertoire and an ability to integrate new types of foods into that repertoire so I will like them (NO, NOT BEETS, but my neighbor likes beets, and the Bs like beets, so I can pass the beets along to people who will definitely eat them). THAT SAID, it’s time consuming. It takes thought and it takes effort. This is NOT something that would integrate particularly well with one or more full-time jobs in a household. This is NOT a solution for the masses. (ETA: I could be wrong about this. I could imagine a world in which some combination of multi-cooker, and recipes targeted to the current contents of the Food Box might make this work more generally.)
I sorta wish it was tho? Because when I look at Ocado, and the automation and delivery version of the supermarket experience, it seems a little nuts.
That said, if I wind up in the delivery area of a Kroger-Ocado or something similar, I’m _definitely_ going to sign up for it and try it out. Because, I mean, did you read what I just wrote? Just because I don’t believe in something, just because it seems kinda crazy, has not stopped me giving it a try to see what it is like yet, and there’s no reason to believe I’ll be changing any time soon.
ETA:
Very, very funny stuff if you google a combo of Amazon and Ocado.
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ocado-aws-is-how/
But also:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/online-grocer-ocado-dismisses-amazon-as-a-very-smaller-competitor-ahead-of-first-kroger-warehouse-launch-11616091386
Still here? Why?!?! Buckle up, buttercup. It could be a bit of a ride.
Recently, I put together the Lego Globe. It was an _awesome_ build, but took a while and was somewhat repetitive. Thus, I listened to podcasts. I specifically went looking for Circular Economy podcasts. What does Circular Economy mean?
It’s like if your Buy Nothing group had a wild threesome with some WW2 Make It Do or Do Without and an overly optimistic, dare we say, rabid recycling group and this was the resulting … whatever. Don’t like that? Sure, it’s inappropriate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy
Enjoy.
Previous trends like Zero Waste, Reducing Food Waste, Eating Local, and ongoing trends like Sustainability all connect well to the Circular Economy theme, and all of them take their Material Culture focus and attempt to rehabilitate it by making claims about how this will reduce carbon. I’m skeptical. A lot of these things look like contemporary incarnations of that minority of humanity that insists on turning the lights off when you leave the room, independent of any thought about things like whether or not you are coming right back, or whether, for that matter, anyone is still in the room, or, heavens, whether or not the startup spike in power might wash out the savings from a short-term turning off of the lights.
It’s better to get rid of incandescents, than to make everyone turn the lights off when they leave the room. Reducing power consumption (and reducing heat production that then triggers greater air conditioning usage) _during use_ is a bigger deal than shaving a few percentage points off here and there in terms of how many minutes a day something is used.
But just because I’m skeptical of a trend is no indication of whether or not I will participate in the trend. Constraints are genuinely fun to play with, and can lead to solutions that I might not otherwise find in the vast wilderness of Free Choice. I’m not particularly anti-packaging, beyond finding it annoying around the holiday season when there’s so much of it that it’s difficult to get rid of without making a special trip to the transfer station (this, of course, refers to back in the day when we had waste pickup). You won’t ever see me taking pictures of the very tiny object in the inappropriately large box. Also, you won’t see me hoarding boxes; I pass those along to get turned into new boxes, altho if someone points me at an operation that recovers lightly used boxes for re-use pre-recycling into new cardboard, I _would absolutely_ collect and deliver our boxes to that operation. But even not being particularly anti-packaging, I could _see_ the strain on our collective system of distribution of the abrupt switch to online shopping and delivery of things once purchased in person in stores, and I tried to figure out ways to mitigate my contribution in the spirit of If Everyone Helps a Little We’ll Get Through This All Right.
I also didn’t really believe in any of the food waste propaganda. The sourcing on the statistics is … poor, and if you believe the general story, the correct solution needs to occur somewhere _other_ than in middle class households. But that didn’t stop me signing up for Imperfect Foods, when my sister was doing Misfit and talking it up constantly. Why not. Imperfect Foods wound up being a great product discovery mechanism for me, altho of course they’ve stopped using 3rd party shippers so I have no access anymore, which is also completely fine by me.
As a child, my family had a chest freezer (one of those old three compartment ones from the pre-frost free days) and we’d drive up to Skagit and buy a large fraction of a cow from John Peth and Sons and bring it home and put it in the freezer. I didn’t really realize that meat could come from the supermarket until some time later in my teens. I was perfectly fine with supermarket meat (sure, it’s worse than what I had as a child, and also worse than what I bought from various butchers over the years, but you know, whatever) and Costco meat, but for some reason that I’m still a little unclear on, I signed up with Walden Local early in 2020 (yeah, that worked out, right?). And while they stopped collecting their coolers, they did want us to save them and eventually they took them all back, which was delightful! Very low packaging! Local delivery! Super cool! So I signed up for Siena Farms in March of 2021. Even less packaging! Still local delivery (I could go pick it up myself, sure). Super cool! I learned a lot about a bunch of food I’d eaten at very expensive restaurants (I know, how weird is that, I eat my first celeriac for outrageous amounts of money in a restaurant; it’s incredibly cheap — if you can buy it at all).
Siena and Walden embody a whole bunch of trends: seasonality, local consumption, reduction in shipping, reduction in packaging, grocery delivery vs. in person shopping. Yes, Walden is _meat_, but it’s pasture, regenerative, organic, integrating animal husbandry with agriculture, yada yada yada. Supporting small scale farming. You know the drill. (Also, it is consistently on the same level as the meat of my childhood.) Siena is obviously all about the plants.
Anyway. I don’t necessarily actually believe in all this stuff. I really don’t. I’m very, very, very efficient in the kitchen, and I have an incredibly broad repertoire and an ability to integrate new types of foods into that repertoire so I will like them (NO, NOT BEETS, but my neighbor likes beets, and the Bs like beets, so I can pass the beets along to people who will definitely eat them). THAT SAID, it’s time consuming. It takes thought and it takes effort. This is NOT something that would integrate particularly well with one or more full-time jobs in a household. This is NOT a solution for the masses. (ETA: I could be wrong about this. I could imagine a world in which some combination of multi-cooker, and recipes targeted to the current contents of the Food Box might make this work more generally.)
I sorta wish it was tho? Because when I look at Ocado, and the automation and delivery version of the supermarket experience, it seems a little nuts.
That said, if I wind up in the delivery area of a Kroger-Ocado or something similar, I’m _definitely_ going to sign up for it and try it out. Because, I mean, did you read what I just wrote? Just because I don’t believe in something, just because it seems kinda crazy, has not stopped me giving it a try to see what it is like yet, and there’s no reason to believe I’ll be changing any time soon.
ETA:
Very, very funny stuff if you google a combo of Amazon and Ocado.
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ocado-aws-is-how/
But also:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/online-grocer-ocado-dismisses-amazon-as-a-very-smaller-competitor-ahead-of-first-kroger-warehouse-launch-11616091386