"Welcome to the (food) desert of the real"

It’s official: my wife, Jen, and I don’t like to travel (although it goes without saying that we love seeing the ones we love so much that we travel to see them). Ours is not an aversion born of social conscious, like e.g. the folks I’ve heard tale of who will never again leave Oregon in the hopes of I’m not sure exactly what, but which almost certainly involves undoing the legacy of the Enlightenment while simultaneously forestalling climate change (whereas if I threatened to never again leave Baltimore I’d likely be deported to Canada, spiritual home of all threats related to one’s putative location). No, ours is a red blooded American antipathy grounded in the fact that everything we want and need is right here at home, i.e. this is where we’re comfortable. (Note the obvious irony in the fact that the initials for the old Soviet Union, U.S.S.R, when spelled in Russian letters, C.C.C.P., align precisely with what the initials U.S.A. stand for in 2014: Comfort, Convenience, Cat videos, and Pizza.)

So it was on a recent trip to North Carolina that, save for the fact that one can travel back and forth between Chapel Hill and Durham from La Quinta Inn on Rt. 15/501 without making a single left or right turn, I might as well have been in Rangoon. (GPS was invented for me, as my fear of getting lost is such that e.g. when travelling I typically like to give myself a four hour cushion when trying to find the airport, which makes my lack of any 21st century navigation devices either masochistic or evocative of Joseph Campbell’s observation that “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”) And save for the Kroger grocery store, located just one straight shootin’ mile from La Quinta on 15/501. Dazed by the combined effects of spending 6 hours in the car with my three children, the younger two of whom spend the full 6 hours combining the hijinks of Moe poking Curly in the eyes with weeping and gnashing of teeth, and passing the night in La Quinta Inn with our dog Sy, which felt strangely like sneaking into the girls’ dorm at boarding school (or at least what I imagine that feels like, given that the closest I ever got to the girls’ dorm at St. Andrew’s came during my visits to Ms. Blenkensop’s dorm-abutting apartment for help with my pre-calculus), entering through the Kroger’s automatic doors felt as comforting as checking to see whether I turned the oven off before leaving out of my house.

There is something about grocery stores. I submit that that something is the pinnacle of western civilization. In many ways the secular west is just a grocery store chain with a slogan: “Man cannot live by bread alone, but it’s a damn good start.” The secular west is also in many ways just an army, and armies, as we all know, march on their stomachs. And one cannot walk into a grocery store without feeling, even if just a little bit, that the world is at your fingertips, which feeling is, of course, the whole point of the secular west. The world is your oyster, at $19.99 a pound. And though I was far from home, the Kroger warped space and time with the very same assortment of Little Debbie products available to me in Baltimore, especially the Oatmeal Creme Pies and Star Crunch (which tellingly, like money, is a noun that can’t be made plural). Like Foucault declaring “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” the Kroger assured me that, appearances notwithstanding, “Ceci n’est pas North Carolina.”

But if we are to assert that grocery stores are the pinnacle of western civilization, remapping its coordinates by the logic to be found in “home is where the food is,” then we must go one step further and confront the mystification rendered by that elusive adjective, western. Go west, young man. To which we may reply, like the legendary Bostonian blue blood asked where she would most like to go in all the world, “But darling, I’m already here.” Unless, after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there,” there is no west here.

Case in point is Baltimore City, where you will find tens of thousands of civilized folks enduring sans (western) civilization, where “there’s no place like home” has given way to “there’s no place near home with any food,” a reality that has entered the popular imagination under the moniker of food deserts: “populated areas with little or no food retail provision… where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) This straightforward, intuitive definition can be found on Wikipedia, where, a few paragraphs later we learn that:

• “Remaining food retailers in inner-cities are gas stations, convenience stores, tobacco stores, drugstores, and liquor stores. A diet based on foods from these locations consists primarily of processed foods high in calories, sugars, salt, fat, and artificial ingredients.” (ibid)

• “Fringe food retailers in food deserts can have a 30-60% markup on prices, provide a limited selection of products and a dominant marketing of processed foods.” (ibid)

• “Areas with a majority of convenience stores have a higher prevalence of overweight and obese individuals, compared to areas with only supermarkets.” (ibid)

• “The availability of supermarkets in African American neighborhoods is 52% of their prevalence in white neighborhoods.” (ibid)

I.e. in food deserts you pay more for toxic foods that will make you obese and give you diabetes and heart disease, all because you happen to be Black. Or, as we say in western civilization, “Prevalence of food deserts in poorer neighborhoods is driven by lack of consumer demand, as the poor have less money to spend on healthful, nutritious food. From an economic standpoint, low demand does not justify supply.” (ibid) The logic in that statement, which is the logic of western civilization, boggles the mind: “Low demand does not justify supply” is just to say “You can’t be hungry unless you have money.”

Because you can’t be hungry unless you have money, Wikipedia goes on to suggest that “adding neighborhood supermarkets may have little benefit to diet quality across the income spectrum,” which is a fancy way of saying that food is not the solution to hunger, and that “the study of food deserts requires further research, including longitudinal studies of food environments, to support associations with obesity and to support neighborhood interventions,” which is a fancy way of saying “Let them eat (Hostess) cake.”

Note that “We now know that agriculture first evolved in the world’s harsh, hot, arid deserts, then spread to more temperate climes – not the other way around, as one might expect. All civilizations first took root in the deserts of the world.” (http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/du_peo_ancient.html) I take this to mean that as western civilization fast approaches its zero hour, (“zero hour- noun- the time at which a planned operation, typically a military one, is set to begin”; at this point is there any other possible ending?), we may find the roots of a new way of life in a most unexpected place, where we too might learn to endure in the desert of the real, where the demands of hunger are universal and, necessarily, graciously, so is the food.