Supermarket egg selection, Beijing, China.

We’ve heard a lot about markets.  They’re folkloric, chaotic places composed of colorful heaps of vegetables and exotic fruits, where persistent sellers with weathered faces bargain in the local tongue, and the occasional chicken or two scurries underfoot.  Sure, I love markets.

But supermarkets are another story.  Stale, fluorescent, odorless, they aim at uniformity and inoffensiveness.  They are places of linoleum floors and stacked shelves, straight aisles and neat bins of dull vegetables.  R.E.M on tinny speakers, flowing out above the frozen meat.

In theory, they leave little to the imagination.  They’re also the playgrounds of evil processed foods and sly little additives dressed up as cartoon characters, and on their stacks are all the excesses of modern agro-industry in shiny packages, piled high.

But still, there’s something about the supermarket that sucks me in.  Is it because it’s a safe cultural space where you’re not being asked to do anything, participate in anything, be aware of potentially being robbed, be overly cognizant of cultural differences?  Is it because people are so caught up in the act of shopping they rarely pay you, the foreigner, much attention?  Because the supermarket is the very representation of possibilities and I am in my late 20’s with only the vaguest idea of a “career” or a “life plan” or even a five or ten year plan, or even, really, what I should be doing today or tomorrow.  Fondling shelves is the equivalent of playing benevolently with the possibilities, indulging myself in the idea of them more than actually following each one through to its potential conclusion.

So there’s this need for possibilities, and on the other hand the need for a break.  From what?  I think people have safe houses, places they go to escape the policías on their tails.  Whether those policías be the real ones with struts and guns, or whether their policías are traffic and stress and sweat and work and the weight of life decisions, people need a place for some détente from the chase.  It’s not home.  Home is often the first place the pursuers will catch up with you.  It’s someplace equis – x – where you are just another person in the crowd, where you don’t count, so to speak, and your swirling mass of super important dilemmas doesn’t count.  Where, in fact, it seems almost irrelevant to think about those dilemmas.

These are neutral non-places – they’re not where you go to think or to do something leisurely, like sip a coffee or see a movie.  They’re where people go to get things done – the laundromat, the supermarket, the car wash.  They’re those blind spots in the day, wedged between the places and situations that count, like work and school and home and the restaurant and the café.  This is what makes them safe – there’s no expectation attached to them, no intellectual or creative or aesthetic purpose, no greater scheme of things.  They’re an alleviation.

For me, these places are supermarkets.  It’s not just the imagination orgasm a foodie can have in a supermarket that draws me in – its the fact that its a place outside of the flow.  A safe house.  And there in the aisles I can float in jalapeño rhapsody for awhile, not me, not thinking about when, where, how or tomorrow, perhaps exploring the theoretical combination of chipotle and green pepper, perhaps not.