'That We May Look Unflinchingly on Death'

My wife vows never to shop again at our neighborhood grocery, less than a mile from our house. I agree that a semi-Third World atmosphere pervades the place. Once I found a puddle of urine on the floor in produce. I watched a woman stuff a bottle of wine into her yoga pants. The customer ahead of me in the checkout line screamed when the guy packing her bag dropped a cantaloupe on the eggs she had just paid for. Twice I’ve witnessed fist fights in the aisles. 

I’m certain plenty of people in the world would marvel at our grocery shelves. So much bounty, so much redundancy and waste. I remember as a kid seeing photos of empty shelves in Soviet stores, with a babushkaed woman staring forlornly. Cold war propaganda? Of course. But accurate, not staged.

 

When I go grocery shopping I assume the role of anthropologist. Much of today’s world is a foreign country to me. I see stuff my parents wouldn’t recognize as food – sushi, plantain, kale, pico de gallo, canned menudo. The last item my father might actually have enjoyed. Like Mr. Bloom he “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”

 

In “Grace to Be Said at the Supermarket” (The Blue Swallows, 1967), Howard Nemerov treats the modern American grocery as an exercise in mathematics, divine grace and the denial of mortality:

 

“This God of ours, the Great Geometer,

Does something for us here, where He hath put

(if you want to put it that way) things in shape,

Compressing the little lambs into orderly cubes,

Making the roast a decent cylinder,

Fairing the tin ellipsoid of a ham,

Getting the luncheon meat anonymous

In squares and oblongs with all the edges bevelled

Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed).

 

“Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance

Upon our appetites, and on the bloody

Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,

Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes

Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number,

Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives

They come to us holy, in cellophane

Transparencies, in the mystical body,

That we may look unflinchingly on death

As the greatest good, like a philosopher should.”