The Fascination with the American Supermarket

I love American supermarkets, and I’m not the only one. My friend Bill – and he should know – tells me that every European who visits California wants to see Disneyland first, the Golden Gate Bridge second and a supermarket third, if possible one of the “mega” variety. Europeans love the market-based shock and awe experience, the true feeling of which can only really be conveyed in a Super-Duper American Shopping Temple.

Because if you’re going to have capitalism, you’ve got to do it right. The only European supermarkets that come anywhere near the mammoth monstrosities of the U.S. are a couple of weird hypermarkets on the outskirts of French cities — although I could be completely wrong about that. At any rate, visitors from the old world should bring a compass or a GPS — or a ball of thread if they don’t want to get lost. In this hectare-sized no-man’s-land, more than one European has gone missing somewhere between greenhouses of frozen pizza and aisles of crackers, never to be seen again.

The shopping trance awaits! This time I surrendered completely to the cookie aisle and the ingenuity of the American cookie industry, which — yum, yum! — in every single state from Alabama to Wyoming rabidly occupies itself with a different variation on the cookie prototype. The success of the different varieties is made possible not only through the addition of every conceivable cookie-compatible accompaniment, but also through the leaving out of things for selective customers.

Thus the aisles are overrun with sugar-free, egg white-free, flour-free, gluten-free and gum-free cookies; there are almost certainly even cookie-free cookies. Of particularly bad repute and currently at the very top of the list of favorite left-out ingredients is high-fructose corn syrup. It’s supposed to make you brutally fat and be hell on the liver.

After the land of cookies, I haunted the miles of shelving of nutritional supplements, over which I invariably gush with joy. You just never know which co-enzymes you could be lacking. Luckily, most American supermarkets are open 24/7. If you are stricken at four in the morning with an acute vitamin B3 deficiency, a lightning-fast remedy is child’s play. And that is, after all, a very comforting feeling.