Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul?

May 4, 2005

Are overlit, heavily toxic supermarkets making you ill and eating

your brain? Why, yes

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.

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and

Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

which it never does. Subscribe to this column at

sfgate.com/newsletters.

May 4, 2005

i adore mark...

i rarely go into giant box supermarkets..and the few times i do, i realize why i never go into them

about 4-5 months ago walked with a friend to get some wine..she went into safeway..ok..so..followed her in...

they even had some weird mass market organic veggies treats..of course, the display was tucked in next to the aisle with the batteries, mop-n-glo and bleach....

i think i damamged my retina from the reflected glow off the shiny floor, the glass/plastic everything and the glossy packaging...

i didn't know apples came in that color red as well...i thought only crayons looked like that.....

and..last july, i was in an albertsons(it was late, and we needed something desperately, and it was in a part of oakland far from anything remotely health/organic store related)

and..i was overwhelmed by the enormous displays of atkins diet merchandising..everywhere...atkins bread?! atkins candy bars?!..suprised they didn't have atkins beer and cigarettes...

i'll stick with farmer's markets, whole paycheck and berkeley bowl..thanx and all

fraggle

And Bugs Bunny is a friend of mine

Eating him I'd feel like Frankenstein

Eating flesh seems pretty foul to me

May 4, 2005

, fraggle <EBbrewpunx@e...> wrote:

> i adore mark...

I love him too - have you seen his latest " what's on Jesus' ipod? "

good stuff.

I too recently wandered into a safeway to get a prescription filled (I

typically get them all from Canada but that doesn't work for

everything). I figured I'm here I might as well pick up a couple of

basic things - bread, etc. Every single loaf of wheat bread - EVERY

ONE - had partially hydrogenated oil in it. Looked at some pickles -

they all had yellow dye #5. Gross. But it was also a good chance to

look at prices since Whole Foods is known as being so expensive - I

figured I could comparison shop. They had one of their stupid " buy

one get one free " things for Raisin Bran (of course loaded with high

fructose corn syrup) - regular price $4.85 - so two boxes for that

price. Well the raisin bran I buy at Whole Foods is 1.99 all the

time.

Safeway is soul sucking indeed.

nancyd (since there is now another nancy I added my last initial - and

welcome to the other nancy!)

May 4, 2005

the yellow dye is added because it activates the nanobots in yer cerebral cortex and they encourage you to buy three boxes of raisin bran along with the latest *Outdoor fresh* new improved Swifter disposable chin wipe njdoane May 4, 2005 9:23 AM Re: Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul? , fraggle <EBbrewpunx@e...> wrote:> i adore mark...I love him too - have you seen his latest "what's on Jesus' ipod?" good stuff.I too recently wandered into a safeway to get a prescription filled (I typically get them all from Canada but that doesn't work for everything). I figured I'm here I might as well pick up a couple of basic things - bread, etc. Every single loaf of wheat bread - EVERY ONE - had partially hydrogenated oil in it. Looked at some pickles - they all had yellow dye #5. Gross. But it was also a good chance to look at prices since Whole Foods is known as being so expensive - I figured I could comparison shop. They had one of their stupid "buy one get one free" things for Raisin Bran (of course loaded with high fructose corn syrup) - regular price $4.85 - so two boxes for that price. Well the raisin bran I buy at Whole Foods is 1.99 all the time. Safeway is soul sucking indeed.nancyd (since there is now another nancy I added my last initial - and welcome to the other nancy!)To send an email to -

May 4, 2005

Ours aren't that bad in the UK. They usually just have the aisle arranged in food types, but not too flash. Maybe people would give it a miss if they did it over here.

Jo

-

fraggle

Wednesday, May 04, 2005 4:44 PM

Re: Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul?