Consider The Shopping Cart

Steel cage. Broken wheels. Sharp and empty. Stackable. Cheap. Plastic flaps so toddlers can stick their chubby little appendages through.

It’s time to retire the shopping cart, a symbol of an era when abundance, convenience and economy were considered the height of achievement. The shopping cart epitomized our triumph over hunger, over a localized, regional food economy. We had achieved an economy of scale with food.

The shopping cart is the device that should come to symbolize everything that was wrong about the 20th Century approach to food in America. Food-like products were overabundant, they were cheap, they were concentrated in one-stop mega marts, and most of all, they were easy to pick up and throw in the cart. All we had to do was walk down the aisles pushing this contraption at 2 miles an hour and fill our baskets. But what were we filling ourselves with?

Schmuck!

It reminds me of the old TV show Supermarket Sweep, when lunatic contestants manically raced down supermarket aisles, frantically filling these giant empty cages with all manner of food products. This was insanity squared. But we couldn’t see it at the time. We called it entertainment instead.

We can see the insanity now. Because the bill is coming due, and its one tab that we simply cannot afford to cover.

There are other reasons the retire the shopping cart. It is an outmoded device. It’s just an open cage. We are prisoners to it. They are sharp and dangerous as any experienced shopper will tell you, sorely rubbing their ankles. How many nicks and scratches must our Hummers endure before we smelt all that steel down and put it to some good use?

Retiring the shopping cart is just another stop on the road towards recognizing just how topsy turvy our approach to food has been. These hollow empty shells were meant to be stackable. They represent the economy of scale. Their are rectangular because our food comes in boxes and plastic containers.

Image Source: Shazari on Flickr