What is the deal with gentrified snacks?
It's getting out of hand.
“We can’t afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy.”
—Marge Simpson
On Sunday, I absolutely rawdogged my five-minute drive to the grocery store. No texting, no responding to work emails, no YouTube shorts, no checking my Strava stats—just my hand on the wheel and focusing intently on the sea of bumper-to-bumper traffic and errant e-bikes zipping along the sidewalks right next to dedicated biking lanes. All of this attention fixated on chaotic transit patterns buzzing around me left my mind depleted by the time I was standing in the snack section, lazily staring at a gargantuan shelf of seemingly endless options and clashing packaging designs vying for my attention.
I snag what appears to be a bag of Doritos, but the vibes are horrendously off. According to the image plastered on the front of the bag, there are hemp seeds flecked across every chip and this snack is called something like “Nathan’s Harvest.” They all have the same two sections written on the back: Our Story and Our Promise to You. And this is how you’ll know they’ll taste awful. Anything that is naturally appetizing doesn’t need to have multiple treatises written on them.
We have ascended to a level of gentrification that now includes snacks.
No One:
Back of an organic snack label: “We love what we do. We are a family. I knew when my kid started shitting blood in 2008, we needed to create the best organic GMO-free pretzel wedges you’ve ever tasted. So that’s what we did. For you. Eat with a smile, please!”
If anything, I want to read about the tragic and conflicted life of a heartless multinational corporation, maybe to pull their story forward and outward in the sense that it contextualizes both the weird pursuit of endless profit and the various things that would lead a person to become a founder.
Our Story: “The original formula was created in the year 1880 by a morphine-addicted ex-Confederate general who thought it could cure syphilis. Since then, our little family has grown and now we are part of the same multinational conglomerate that sold chemical weapons to both sides during World War II. The FDA made us remove the cocaine, but our sugar water is still pretty fucked up.”
Our Promise to You: “If you try to unionize one of our bottling plants, we will zap you with the heart attack laser.”
Bought a coffee the other day with an Our Journey written on the side of the cup. Learning about the hard won immigrant story of the CEO's Sicilian grandparents didn't make it taste any better and at the end of the day you know the stuff came from the same wretched Guatemalan bean farm that I can only roll the dice and hope pays its workers with money.
Help! They took away my beloved Albertson’s and its delightfully wacky and gregarious elderly checkout lady and are putting in another yuppy grocery store! I don’t want your $14 fake organic Triscuits in a green and white box! If I wanted to eat cardboard I’d eat the box!