As the first round of exams descends upon thousands of students, some of you may find yourself under obscene amounts of stress.
You may find yourself twitching involuntarily, grinding your teeth in your sleep, smoking dozens of cigarettes, or even yelling at strangers simply to release some tension. Everyday tasks become perverse, torture-filled nightmares. Your mind will instantaneously flood with pure white rage in a fraction of the time it takes the person who bumped into you to say, “Excuse me.” Fear not dear reader, there is hope.
In my extensive travels, I have found a Shangri-La that is as near to you as your local grocery store. In fact it is your local grocery store.
Like any type of store, grocery stores are designed in such a way that presents their merchandise in the most visually appealing way. However, the grocery store has a significantly greater amount of merchandise and brands for sale than just about any other type of store. The grocery store provides a shelf space for several of the same products and allows you to choose. Which brand of potted meat will be your next meal? You decide.
The decision of a particular product over another usually depends heavily on its price. Kroger-brand white bread sells for $.78, God bless America. But how does one decide when the price negligible? Will the can of baked beans with the familiar logo be victorious over the can with the retro, “I think this is a collectible” label? Once again it is your decision.
As you stroll casually up and down the carefully engineered and well spaced, precise aisles, just take a look at all of the labels aimed at attracting your attention — each one different and designed to sell the unique product underneath it. Every jar of spaghetti sauce or bottle of clam juice is screaming “BUY ME!”
Beyond the pre-packaged food that is imported to the grocery store shelves, many stores prepare and sell their own food. The baked goods, fried chicken and potato salad, just to name a few, are some of the ready-to-eat foods sold at grocery stores. While made in the store, these items have the taste and feel of being homemade.
The idea of something being homemade or having a homemade flavor invokes a wide range of emotion on an even greater range of people. For instance, homemade barbecue ribs may remind someone of the Fourth of July picnic when her hair caught on fire and she was forced to wear a wig for the next six months — in which time she fell in love with a Panamanian carpet salesman named Fernando, only to have her heart broken when Fernando learned that his love was not naturally bald. And to somebody else, those same exact barbecue ribs may only recall thoughts of diarrhea.
A much more common emotion, while as subtle as it may be, is the feeling of love attached to the grocery store’s homemade food. When most of us were young, we had someone older who cooked food for us. In the majority of cases, that older person also loved us. The next time you eat a store bought oven baked chicken, you might think to yourself, “This is pretty good,” but subconsciously be reminded of your dear old mother with the nine lip rings and the inverted cross-cornea tattoos.
Finally, the last aspect of the seemingly ordinary grocery store is the connection to nature. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels ranted about how dehumanizing modern labor was because workers were separated from nature. The grocery store is the perfect example of the union between man and nature: natural products grown, produced, packaged, distributed and put on display thanks to man’s mastering of science. Food items from all over the world are brought to your local produce aisle just for you. This is more than the union of man in nature but a display of capitalism and the benefits of globalism.
Your local grocer is more than just a place to buy food, it’s a place to relax and reflect. When the pressure of absolute failure engulfs your soul and you can see a life of abject poverty as clear as day before your eyes, take a walk down the soup aisle. Look at all the hard work that has been done for your benefit. Enjoy the attention that modern grocery stores dispense to its customers, and feel one with nature.