Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul?

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Is Safeway Sucking Your Soul?

Are overlit, heavily toxic supermarkets making you ill

and eating your brain? Why, yes

 

Source >

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/04/15/notes041505.DTL

 

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.

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