Time Machine Series:
Exploring Past, Present, and Future
PAST
Around seven or eight-years-old, I figured out hamburger was made from a cow, and so began an inadvertent period of vegetarianism. For a long stretch, I survived on buttered toast and jelly, Lipton instant chicken soup and saltines, and bowls of cereal. The butter and milk I didn’t mind. It was the meat that didn’t seem right. I eventually came around to more variety in my diet with travel and age. In college, I even took a job as a butcher at a health food grocery store. My meat aversions had more or less passed by then. What I couldn’t understand was how annoyingly discerning the customers were about their food. How they wanted to see and smell everything, have it cut to exact standards.
PRESENT
Every week that I’m not on the road, I open my meal planning app to curate our family’s menu. I then make my pilgrimage to the supermarket, and hand-select our food. I enjoy the touch and feel of the produce, cross-checking expiration dates on packaged goods, assessing the color of meats, evaluating price points and specials. I’ve become not only our family’s food procurement officer, but also head chef, and nutrition consultant. I take pride in all of this, knowing that a weekly trip to the grocery store is quite a privilege: one that my sons are beginning to understand. Where my ancestors hunted, fished, and gathered their food, I plan, pick, and prepare. I want my boys to at least know how to do the same, and one day do it better.
FUTURE
After all these years, the Rainforest Retailer is now going backward in time, opening these mini-mercados. It happened when they put bookstores out of business, then several years later, opened little book shops so people could once again touch and feel their words before they bought them. We’ve been pointing and clicking at two dimensional versions of apples, cereal boxes, and chicken breast for decades, thinking it was the most logical way to feed ourselves. And yet, there’s something nourishing about going to the market itself. I’m an old man now, and my sons tease me for still making my weekly trip to these scaled-down versions of what they once were, but when they join my wife and I, they marvel at what they find, just like they did when they were boys.
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Photo credit: Gabriela Pinto
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