The Hippie Grocery Store Dilemma

            As an Athenian, I want to shop at the hippie grocery stores.  As an Athenian, it’s required and expected of me to at least occasionally drop by the farmers market and to frequent Earth Fare and/or Trader Joe’s.  As a proud Athenian, overflowing with civic pride, I should shop at the Daily Co-Op.  I want to do these things.  Often I do…but these stores still have far too many negatives for me to completely commit to giving up on Krogering. 

            For one thing, hippie grocery stores are way too freaking expensive.  I understand why farmers markets are pricier.  They may not have to pay a middle man and sacrifice goat cheese to Benzoatus, the Roman god of preservatives, but you can be surer of freshness at farmers markets than anywhere this side of the 19th century, so you have a standard progressive justification for paying five bucks for an onion.  Supporting local food producers is a part of the unspoken Athenian Oath (((Editor’s Note: there actually is an Athenian Oath---read out loud in that other Athens---and carved onto the base of our statue of Athena outside of the Classic Center))).  It’s as important as the dictates telling us that we should own a bicycle and burn Paul Braun’s frequent mailers before reading.  Dear God that guy sends out a lot of flyers. 

            Generally speaking, the residents of Athens are very good about shopping as locally and as responsibly as possible without really going out of our way.  I like Earth Fare.  I try to shop there as often as possible, and not only because the cashiers are always so damn cute.  But (and here’s the point) I simply can’t yet justify giving up on Publix and Ingles entirely.  First off, hippie paper towels are AWFUL.  They’re thin.  They’re never two-ply.  They’re less absorbent than notebook paper.  And yet, they cost more.  I’m sure that Trader Joe’s’ paper towels only come from free-range trees who committed suicide after long and fulfilling lives and wrote into their wills that they wanted to end up on a shelf on Lumpkin Street.  Even so, I can’t bring myself to buy them.  And, on the rare occasions when I do, I remember why I pledged years ago to support the Industrial Paper Towel Industry, even if it leads to a Bigfoot-sized carbon footprint. 

            The same goes for toilet paper.  No, I’ll double down on that one.  Hippie toilet paper is even worse than hippie paper towels.  It’s often scratchy, not something you want when you’re wiping.  It’s sometimes so thin that it’s translucent.  That problem could be solved if the hippie toilet paper people followed the industry standard and added a second ply, but, of course, that would violate the hippie code.  I WANT that extra ply.  I NEED that extra ply.  Hell, I’d be ECSTATIC if they added a third ply.  Four might be too many, but just now thinking about a three-ply Angel Soft four-pack sent a shiver of excitement up my spine.  I don’t even think that the mental trade-off favors the hippie TP, since you have to use more of it to finish the job than you would if you were using the products of Big Butt Wipe (they’ve got powerful lobbyists in D.C.).

            Paper products are the major offenders, but they’re not the only ones.  Earth Fare charges three bucks for a slice of their homemade pizza.  Granted, they’re large slices, but, if you have a coupon and aren’t too lazy to drive, you can get an entire pie at Papa John’s for the price of two Earth Fare slices.  I don’t like Mr. Schnatter’s cheap crap anymore than you do, but sometimes cheap trumps good for the planet. 

            The Trader Joe’s grocery shopping experience leaves something to be desired.  Earth Fare is a happy place, full of children’s laughter, college girls in spandex, local art on the walls, and visible employees making fresh food.  Trader Joe’s is the opposite of that.  Trader Joe’s is the hospital of grocery stores.  It’s clean.  It’s left-brained.  It’s boring.  I’ve had more fun at the dentist. 

            What’s more, hippie grocery stores do have healthier cereal.  In their defense, they rarely do that evil Kroger thing where the store puts the Lucky Charms at grocery cart kid eye-level, counting on modern parents’ being too embarrassed by their kids’ whining to refuse to buy crap cereal.   

I like Nature’s Path cereal.  Wanting to hold onto my Peter Pan Complex until I’m at least fifty, I eat a lot of cereal.  But, since I’m not actually still thirteen, I buy the healthier cereal, and so, a box of my favorite cereal now costs me five bucks…and it’s a small, Grape Nuts-sized box.  Those five bucks equal about two-and-a-half servings.  Two bucks per bowl?  That’s really not worth it.  Does Nature really need to charge a five dollar toll for us to enter her path?

            Hippie grocery stores are less obvious about killing animals.  They have to be.  Preppy grocery stores have lobster tanks.  Sometimes they have open meat counters with sides of beef, and they always have chicken parts on top of Styrofoam, covered with plastic wrap.  Hippie grocery stores can’t keep live animals in their stores.  That would destroy the illusion that their seafood never sang “Under the Sea” with Ariel.  Their seafood was responsibly-caught, not farm-raised, and used to have deep, philosophical conversations with fly fishermen in Oregon about Kant and Nietzsche.  They try and subconsciously present the idea that their seafood somehow WANTS to be eaten, and definitely WANTS to cost more.  It’s an ocean status thing.

            There are cheeses in the hippie grocery stores that don’t otherwise exist in America.  There are varieties of olives that Food Lion wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole made out of high fructose corn syrup.  And the one that gets me the most is the bakery.  Hippie grocery stores have been wildly successful in their plan to periodically introduce new and formerly-foreign wheat varieties into the American culinary selection.  Would Americans be familiar with pita bread outside of Manhattan vendor carts were it not for the efforts of hippie grocers?  Would we all know what ciabatta means?  We would still be making bologna sandwiches on white bread with Hellmann’s mayonnaise if it weren’t for hippie grocery stores.  Granted, that’s probably a positive change, but I still resent it a little. 

            I WANT to ONLY shop at the hippie stores.  I WANT to buy locally.  I wouldn’t even mind meeting my local farmers (if only they weren’t such early risers and didn’t close shop by noon).  There’s got to be a way to pluck the best elements of the chain behemoth stores out of their grasp and incorporate them into the hippie culinary experience.     

How do we do this?