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There was a time, long before we’d ever conceived of the phrase “shoppy shop,” when I loved nothing more than going to a specialty grocery store. “Bougie grocery store” was a phrase I said with love and not an ounce of judgment. I loved the delightfully corny graphic design of the products on shelves at little chef-beloved markets, the rare locations where one could reliably find locally made, small-batch, niche products that weren’t yet available elsewhere.
I went to Eataly when bored, trusting that I’d find something new there to drum up some impulses of desire and inspiration; even if I didn’t buy anything, I could be shaken from the doldrums of daily life by picking up a small piece of obscure cheese, a jar of something I’d never seen in a jar before, or a fancy bag of chips. I loved the curiosity these shelves inspired; they felt like capsules of the world. Here were products I’d never seen at the regular grocery store and which transported me into a vision of a different self — one more learned, more cultured even without traveling, more artistic simply by virtue of having an interesting ingredient to play with.
Something has happened. Today, I enter fancy grocery stores — a category that now seems larger and easier to find than ever — and, often, I feel something closer to disdain, sometimes even going as far as legitimate disgust. In the place of earnest specialty shops with heart and character (and lovingly ugly Comic Sans labels) is a slew of ripoff Erewhons: sleek, streamlined, and moneyed. What I take issue with is less the “shoppy shops” than the “luxury grocers.” They sell premade food and precut vegetables at prices that have prompted me to audibly gasp. Their shelves are a tasteslopped barrage of buzzword-y products like “microplastic-free salt” and tallow-fried tortilla chips.
The fancy grocery stores in whose aisles I’ve found respite in the past felt like places for food lovers, where burly, bearded cheesemongers sang the praises of ultra-funky washed-rinds as though they didn’t smell like actual feet. What I see on these postmodern shelves, though, is food less driven by curiosity and creativity than by fear. Fancy grocery stores have become a nexus for laundering conservative ideology under the compelling guise of pantry goods that are nice to look at. Sourcing, here, seems to matter more for the granularity of what a product does not include (i.e., seed oils), rather than any real investment in agriculture or farmers or local economies; the value of the small farm becomes the fact that it’s more likely to sell raw milk.
These grocery stores feel winnowed of passion and even self-involvement. They are places where a handful of Brussels sprouts, cut for you and placed into plastic, costs $17, for people who see food primarily as a form of “optimization,” social status, or table decor for a TikTok Day in My Life. I want food to feel fun, hedonistic, and pleasurable, not fraught and neurotic in the way these stores inspire. They feel like one-stop shops for orthorexia. Fancy grocery stores and I now feel like a couple who have been together forever but who inch further away from each other in the bed at night. Our lived experiences, future goals, and senses of self have diverged too much.
How else is a food lover supposed to feel when fancy grocery stores have become, primarily, places for people with means but not very much taste nor sense — that “microplastic-free” salt literally has plastic packaging — to flex their ludicrous levels of disposable income? The fancy grocery store today is a place for $32 ice and $45-per-pound tuna salad from a cold case.
Not to be dramatic, but I think there is some moral rot involved in normalizing this cultural shift, especially when many Americans are, simultaneously, simply buying fewer groceries because they can no longer afford to buy as much as they once did. Of course, as with buying a Birkin, the exclusivity is the point; we live in a world that has seen $250-a-jar, limited-edition celebrity honey, single-sourced from the gardens of Will Ferrell or Ai Weiwei.
The funny but also illuminating thing here is that the Erewhonification of fancy grocery stores comes at the same time as the democratization of Whole Foods. For so long and for so many people, the latter once represented the pinnacle of unnecessarily luxurious grocery store spending. While this shift is obviously a factor of the company’s new Amazon ownership (and certainly the quality of both the goods on offer and the overall shopping experience has suffered because of that), there is something jarring about the fact that the store once nicknamed “Whole Paycheck” now offers the cheapest everyday grocery option near me (in New York City) in multiple categories. The whole situation feels sinister, as though people with ample means needed a more exclusive option as a result of Whole Foods having become “too accessible.”
I do not hate Erewhon. For that matter, I have found myself transfixed in its aisles, wondering how water could become $12, and inevitably fantasizing about the dewy, optimized, supplemented self that might be brought about by developing an Erewon-enabled kelp noodle and cold-pressed juice habit. I think fondly of the vacation I took to Los Angeles, when, slurping a Hailey Bieber smoothie and feeling entranced by its hyper-concentrated strawberry flavor, I remarked to my husband, “I don’t know, maybe $21 for a smoothie isn’t that ridiculous, when that’s just what cocktails cost, and those are bad for you.”
I understand the lure, but I also want to resist its ubiquity. Let Erewhon be Erewhon. Can’t everywhere else just be normal?
