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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul?
  • Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 05:31:48 -0600



Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul?
Are overlit, heavily toxic supermarkets making you ill and eating your
brain? Why, yes
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/04/15/notes041505
.DTL&nl=fix
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, April 15, 2005

It's like a goddamn circus in there.

It really is. It's like some bizarrely overlit funhouse, a massive chaotic
attack on all your senses and an outright assault on your optic nerves, and
that's well before you've even made it past the towering display of Bud
Light and well before the huge end-cap cases of Ruffles Sour Cream and
Strychnine and about a mile away from the chemical-blasted,
hormone-injected, meat-like slabs in the butcher's section that seem to
look at you as you amble by, and hiss.

This is what it feels like to walk into any giant chain supermarket these
days, from Safeway to Albertsons to Ralphs to Vons to you name it, and I
have hereby come to the slightly snarky conclusion that it's a true wonder
that more people don't walk out of these places suffering something akin to
full-body spasms and devolving into semi-catatonic mumblings about loudly
colored boxes of S'Mores cereal and giant bags of neon-orange Doritos
attacking them from above.

In fact, actually, some people do. Some people pick up on these nasty
agents of vibrational doom far more than others. Maybe that someone is you.
And maybe you don't even realize just how bad it is. Yet.

Observe, won't you, the frozen premolded wax-glazed Pepperoni Bagel Bites
that taste like cardboard and rancid sheep's blood. Note the
Reese's-flavored, sugar-drenched breakfast cereal that looks like something
your dog coughed up and which makes your kids' eyes wobble after they eat
it.

Taste, won't you, the yummy insect parts aswim in that foot-high stack of
cheap-ass, hyperpink Oscar Mayer bologna. Listen in wonder as that case of
Dr. Pepper seems to cry out to your pancreas, begging to induce type 2
diabetes. Feel your very colon quiver and scream as you stroll by the wall
of frozen Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage biscuits. Woe is your body and your
spirit in this savage, toxic wasteland.

Remember that news item from last year about that insanely manic Pokemon
cartoon that induced epileptic fits in all those Japanese kids? Too many
bright flashing lights. Too much screaming color. Too much artificial
everything. The spirit, the soul, the body, they can handle only so much.
Especially if said mind/body/spirit have been at all retuned,
awareness-raised, karmic-pain-threshold lowered.

I deem it Supermarket Syndrome. It is what happens when you spend
increasing amounts of your grocery-shopping time in local natural markets,
farmer's markets, Whole Foods or (here in S.F.) Rainbow Grocery, or in any
of a thousand smaller health marts around town - and don't give me the
you're-an-elitist, I-can't-afford-that-stuff argument, because there are
plenty of cheap farmer's markets and healthy grocery stores right now,
places full of quiet lighting and healthy grains and organic produce and
friendly service and foods that don't have, as their first ingredient,
imminent death, or refined sugar, or high-fructose corn syrup, or Bright
Flaming Red No. 3, or Known Cancerous Substance No. 4, or Raging
Obesity-Related Heart Disease No. 11.

They are places, in other words, where you walk in and spend an hour of
your life and it immediately feels, you know, different. Better. Healthier.
Lighter. More natural. And you walk out and you go, hey, wow, check it out:
no searing headache.

And when you shop in these places for a while, an amazing thing happens:
your body changes. Your senses recalibrate. You calm down. Equilibrium
returns. You note all the pronounceable ingredients. You note that there
aren't endless arrays of garbage foods, most of them marketed to children
and every single one sealed in hideous molded plastic tubs containing more
packaging than foodstuff. And you note the people, the customers, seem
less, I don't know, dazed? Overwhelmed? Drugged?

And then, when you least expect it, you find yourself in some situation or
in some town with no other grocery options and you innocently walk back
into Safeway to try to buy some organic hormone-free eggs (ha-ha yeah right
good luck) - and WHAM. Sensory overload. Low-vibration overload. You get
what in meditation circles they would call whacked, slapped upside the
spirit by dank, malicious energy. Supermarket Syndrome.

Pork-like sausage in a can. Cool Whip with enough high-fructose corn syrup
to caulk your driveway. Creepy chicken-flavored sauce packets, ten to a
box. Precut celery. Precut cookie dough. Precut everything because you're
too lazy to handle a knife. Nabisco honey-flavored Teddy Grahams shaped
like Dora the Explorer. Dawn Wash & Toss. Crustless white bread of
sufficient consistency to plug Hoover Dam.

We are amazing beings, we bipeds. We adapt. We can endure the most
unlivable crap and the most unhealthy exposure and think it's completely
fine and normal.

Normal, that is, until we take one step away from it and spend a little
time outside a given teeming cauldron of low-vibrational culture, and then
when we happen to step back in for a second, we can only go Oh my freaking
God how in the hell did I ever do this? How did I ever live here eat this
drink that lick those shop here wear that date her consume this believe
that?

Remember how when you were a little kid and you drank gallons of
pasteurized two-percent milk with your Oreos and you thought it was amazing
and good? And then when you reached adulthood you (hopefully) got away from
that nasty stuff and maybe switched to nonfat or even (hopefully) soy or
almond or rice milk because you learned that milk is for babies and
besides, those sad cows are pretty much bathed in noxious hormones and
chemicals from birth? Remember?

And then one day you just so happened to be handed a glass of old-school
milk and you remembered your happy childhood, so you took a big swig and
almost gagged because it tasted like thick liquid phlegm and you were like,
"Oh my God, how the hell did I ever drink this crap?" Supermarket Syndrome
is exactly like that, except with buildings.

And yes, it really is vibrational. And yes, your body can actually feel it,
feel the violent lack of positive energy in all that processed crap, feel
it deep down, where the meanings are, and if you've ever walked out of
Safeway or Best Buy or Wal-Mart feeling oddly soiled and grimy and vaguely
depressed, if not outright sick to your stomach, you know exactly what I
mean.

Blue ketchup. Peanut-butter yogurt with little plastic dome-tops full of
chocolate sprinkles and M&M's and freeze-dried, strawberry-like lumps.
Sugar-free SnackWell's cookies featuring GMO wheat and eight pounds per
square bite of cancer-happy sucralose and aspartame. Velveeta. Kraft
"Shrek"-shaped Cheese Nips featuring enough thiamine mononitrate and
disodium phosphate and partially hydrogenated oil and outright
brain-cramping MSG to kill, well, Shrek.

We are surrounded. We are immersed. American consumer culture is teeming
with so many neon-colored, overprocessed, semicomestible, demon-spawn
products we can no longer even recognize how bad it is, how it is all meant
to drive us slowly insane, so slowly we forget to keep asking why we feel
so sick all the time, and we just shut the hell up and buy more giant tubs
of Country Crock to go with our liquefied reconstituted pork tubes because
we think this is the only way.

Of course, it's not. The solution is easy. Get your flesh happy. Get the
hell out of Safeway and Albertsons and the big-box stores that only want to
pummel your sense of humanity and joy and suck your soul through your
eyeballs.

Hie thee to local markets, organic places, natural foods, small grocery
stores staffed by people who do not seem to be secretly mapping out ways to
dismember your children as they ring up your groceries. Do not
underestimate the effect this form of simple escape and recalibration can
have on your overall sense of well-being and hope. It is not too late. The
rice milk is waiting.





  • [Livingontheland] Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul?, Tradingpost, 04/17/2005

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