In March, of All Months, Americans Went Food Shopping to Shelter in Place

Though officially the first month of Spring, March is still a problem month in the kitchen. Green vegetables are limited in choice and the cheaper sorts have been eaten, in various guises, all too often. Salads are almost non-existent . . . Potatoes are down to the oldest and most battered. Home-killed lamb is at its dearest. Herrings are out of season. Only the most ordinary fruits are plentiful, but they are imported and far from bargain prices.

Georgina Horley, Good Food on a Budget (London: Penguin, 1969).

As I loaded my shopping cart early last month with packaged salad mix, fresh raspberries, grapefruit, a plastic bag of baking potatoes, eggs, milk, and fresh meat, this passage from a book that helped me cook through hungry graduate student days came back to me. As did “Oh for something green,” my father’s annual early Spring plea.

OK, this was England so lamb and herring played the role that ground beef and salmon now does in the United States. OK, it was fifty years ago.

Even so, it’s a sharp reminder of how the grocery store has changed in half a century. Elsewhere the author, Georgina Horley, speaks of hens laying a ‘glut of eggs’ and the need to buy and pickle them if you are a keen cake-maker. She surveys ‘tinned foods’ in the days when most remained expensive luxuries rather than cheap and nasty substitutes. Red salmon is ‘absurdly dear,’ the ‘Spam’ made outside the US ‘expensive, and for my taste salty,’ and complete meals consist of ‘unrecognizable stewed-to-a-rag meat in as sea of pasta and cornfloury gravy.’ Tinned beans, and tomatoes pass but no other vegetables.

Frozen fish is more expensive than fresh, continues Horley, so only for those who live in the country out of reach of a fishmonger. Frozen meat barely gets a mention, but frozen peas, corn (a novelty) and other vegetables are good value when you consider there is no waste but your really need to go to a ‘Sainsbury’s self-service shop’ (supermarket forerunner) to get them at a reasonable price.

Now fresh food is season-less, thanks to an extraordinary mix of demand from consumers, construction of hugely expensive infrastructure particularly the cold chain from field to fridge, new forms of packaging from shrink wrap to the diapers under the meat, immigrant labor, transformations in the life cycle of dairy cows and poultry, inventions of new ways of growing and harvesting plants and the concentration of this in areas of comparative advantage, the output of research labs in the big food processors such as ConAgra, General Mills, Nestle, and Unilever, and the growth of middlemen (logistics companies) to get products to consumers.

“Of all the qualities we seem in food, freshness best satisfies . . . modern appetites. It offer both proof of our progress and an antidote to the ills that progress brings,” as Susanne Freidberg observes in Fresh: A Perishable History (Harvard University Press, 2009),

Along with canned beans and tuna, the white flour and the rice, ‘fresh’ food continued to be piled into shopping carts across the United States throughout March.

The end of winter and spring across the northern part of the globe were the cruelest months when supplies were stretched thin. across the northern part of the globe ran short. In the past, societies labored through the summer to prepare for the end of winter and spring.

Just over a hundred years ago, Elmer McCollum, the pioneering American biochemist who insisted on the influence of diet, particularly milk and leafy greens, on health and who was famed for his work on vitamins A, B, and D, as a child in rural Kansas had suffered from scurvy.

Hunger, plague, and war went hand in hand, each worsening the likelihood of the other, right through World War I and World War II.

In contrast to this dismal past, the American supermarket stood up remarkably well to the demand created by the most recent plague, COVID-19, at least through March and into April.

Yet the stories that have been told about food and where it comes from in the past generation are stories of local food and farmer’s markets, of small farms, and artisanal producers, of natural and, yes, ‘fresh’ food.

By contrast, supermarkets have played little role in our stories except for urgings to avoid the center aisles, advice thrown to the winds in the last month. The multiple strands of people and machines that move food from farm to processor, from processor to the supermarkets have had essentially no role whatever in the tales we tell ourselves while food processors and agribusiness are the ugly sisters or, worse, the villains of the tales.

Everyone I have spoken to wants to learn from the mess we are now in so that in the future the country is better prepared. One bit of this massive task, and the one that most interests me as a food historian, is to re-think the stories we have lived with. What is the structure, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the huge complex that kept the shelves of supermarkets pretty much filled during unprecedented demand throughout March, the hungriest of all months of the year.

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