The Fresh Market

It must take at least three geese to make up a gaggle, but what constitutes an embarrassment of riches? Everybody in America is created equal, but that still doesn't keep us from gushing over the lifestyles of the rich and famous. We're fascinated by the rich and fantasize about being one of them. No one seems too embarrassed about making big bucks or aspiring to do so.

 

Economic inequalities are serious business. Some people believe the pursuit of wealth is rigged against the people on the bottom, and it makes them angry. I feel that way myself at times, but more often I've got a more complicated reaction.

 

The Philadelphia Story, a Katherine Hepburn-Cary Grant comedy made in the middle of the Depression, is about the ambiguities of American class conflict. It contrasts the lifestyle of a super-rich family marrying off its elder daughter with the struggling, lower-middle-class style of a reporter—played by Jimmy Stewart—who is hired to cover the affair.

 

I think this movie gets closer to what economic inequality feels like because every time I go to the Fresh Market--the grocery store serving old-money Sequoyah Hills, in Knoxville, Tennessee--I feel just like Jimmy Stewart. It's not anger at all, really, more a weird combination of dazzled fascination and reverse snobbery.

 

Take the musak. I honestly doubt that Baroque quartets are the appropriate soundtrack for squeezing tomatoes, but that's the way things are at the Fresh Market. And while my sense of taste should have me gagging at the store's studiedly casual ostentation, I find it instead so inviting and cozy that I want to move in.

 

I probably couldn't afford it. Comparable staples totaling $45.81 at the Kroger across the street cost $53.72 at Fresh Market. But you don't come to Fresh Market for staples. Meat and potatoes they've got, but they've also got Organic Flax Plus Multigrain Cereal, prepared chicken cordon bleu at the butcher's counter, frozen Cuisine Solutions Braised Veal Osso Buco, cans of Haddon House Hearts of Palms.

 

This is a specialty store. They have specialty beers, specialty salsas, specialty potato chips. There are whole aisles of bins of bulk nuts, mixed snacks, candies, and coffee beans including flavors like molten chocolate and caramel macchiato. The store offers Christmastime abundance year round.

 

The store smells like Christmas cookie dough. The ceiling is dark and the aisles colorful. The store has the elegance and bustle of Grand Central Station. Price specials on meats and produce are posted on blackboards hung on the walls.

 

The flowers at the front of the store are beautiful, and the potted plants near the produce section include six-inch-tall bonsai trees and a full selection of potted herbs.

 

It pays, just for your own sense of personal integrity, to keep reminding yourself that this is a planned environment; that there are chain of 80 of these stores, centered mainly in the Southeast, from Florida to Wisconsin; that what you're experiencing is a well-executed formula. This is particularly important at this store, where the old money ambience of Sequoyah Hills washes over the entire scene and makes subjective judgment nearly impossible.

 

Europe has art, architecture, and culture that have been around so long that the moss grows on them; in America the main lasting heritage we've got is our money. Where other countries have prospered and faded, we have been rich for a long time.

 

Downtown Rome looks like it did in the Renaissance, in some parts like it did in the Empire. Downtown Knoxville has individual old buildings, but the overall look is knocked down and rebuilt continually.

 

An old residential area like Sequoyah Hills, though, offers continuity, substance, permanence, and its Fresh Market is part of that. Maybe the best use for our money is to simply sustain identity; Fresh Market is an artificial village market that's been around so long it's become a real one.

The Wile E. Coyote Kroger

Approaching from the south you see the Kroger suspended above the intersection of Pellissippi Parkway and Northshore Drive, hanging in the air supported by—well, by not much of anything these days, beyond the convictions of suburbanites west of Knoxville, Tennessee, that gas prices are bound to fall soon.

 

The store's namesake coyote (scientific name Overconfidentii vulgaris) is, of course, always bound to fall, but only after his Acme Rocket Shoes have failed to make that last hairpin turn and blasted him instead 1500 yards from the edge of the cliff into empty space.

 

He doesn't drop immediately even then—he hangs there maybe a good 10 seconds, when it finally dawns on the hapless animal that there's nothing below him but a gaping chasm. He gives us one crestfallen glance before his long descent, ending in a muted crash and puff of dust at the bottom of the canyon.

 

You know what's going to happen every time. The repeated failure of beautiful illusions, that's the American story, from roadrunner cartoons to suburban grocery stores. What do you do with people who spend election after election looking for a General Patton type who drinks Budweiser and bowls 300—especially when you know that given a choice between the real Patton and the guy who played him in the movie we'd probably go for George C. Scott? Americans live in permanent suspension of disbelief.

 

The Kroger at Northshore Drive and Pellissippi also hangs like Wile E. Coyote, happily suspended in that instant before the long fall. The store looks great. Hell, it is great. It's huge. There's a veritable garden center outside the store, plus a pharmacy, a bank branch, and a Starbucks inside.

 

The Kroger sells and rents videos, greeting cards, lawn furniture, TVs. The produce department offers beautiful fruits and vegetables, there is a large selection of organic and natural products, the deli and bakery are large and well stocked, the meat department is everything you could want it to be. The prices are reasonable and the store offers double off manufacturer's coupons.

 

So what's the problem? Nothing, if gas prices fall back to $2.50 a gallon by winter. Maybe they will, but Kroger itself seems to be betting that's not going to happen. The store has opened its own gas pumps, with a minor price break for shoppers with a Kroger card. The price has fallen somewhat in the last week but still hovers above $3.70 a gallon, up 30 cents since the spring.

 

The shoppers buying gas and groceries at the Northshore Kroger, and there were a lot of them, pulled up in Escapes, Blazers, Odysseys, Explorers, Quests, and Caravans. Presumably they came out of the green hills dotted with subdivisions visible from Pellissippi Parkway, and from the homes springing up along the Tennessee River for miles to the west. They probably filled up for the trip home.

 

Does it help to know that the price of gas is twice as high in Europe? Does it help to know that, with food prices driven by the cost of oil, hungry people have rioted in the Third World? The price of Kroger's chuck roast is up 70 cents over what it was in February, but the shoppers there haven't taken to the streets.

 

We haven't got streets to riot in, just interstates and exits and parking lots. As far as the Europeans are concerned, they've got trains, and subways, and coffeehouses within walking distance on every corner. We have to do Starbucks drive-through, or at best go to the Kroger, park in the lot, and then stroll in for our coffee.

 

All things considered, I can't say that West Knox County really has the infrastructure it needs for the coming fall; illusions out the wazoo, but no infrastructure.

Back to the Snootville Kroger

I review grocery stores for Metro Pulse, the alternative paper in Knoxville, Tennessee. Writing reviews of grocery stores is like reviewing people's living rooms. There is something intimate about buying food. It's not like going to a movie or going out to eat. People do that two or three times a month maybe, and there's no big emotional investment on their part; they might develop loyalties to a particular restaurant or movie star or director, or even like the popcorn sold at a particular theater.

But they go to the grocery store every day or every other day, almost as often as they make an evening meal, and that store becomes more than just a place they visit for fun sometimes. It becomes part of their neighborhood, the place they are from, part of their history and identity.

I'm just figuring some of this stuff out. I am a relative newcomer to the esoteric world of literary supermarket criticism. I'm learning fast, though. A couple of reviews ago, I suggested that the people of South Knoxville deserved a little more fun and pizzazz in their lives that I thought their Kroger was providing.

The result was a full-page letter in the next issue of the paper from an insulted South Knoxvillian, who reported being fully catered to and entertained by the neighborhood Kroger, thank you very much, and implied that I could take my opinions back to whatever condescending Snootville I happened to have crawled out of.

While claiming to hate grocery shopping and to patronize the South Knoxville only because it is close to home, the writer did take the time to go there before sending the letter and count the more than 40 kinds of deli meat and poultry available, just as in the Krogers in other neighborhoods. As for the South Knoxville hollows that I described as looking as inaccessible as the upper reaches of the Amazon, the writer explained they were inaccessible because South Knoxvillians treasure their privacy, presumably against the inroads of wiseasses like me.

Having never been on the receiving end of a well-written put-down, I found my self considering the boundaries of neighborhood and personal identity. I didn't grow up in South Knoxville; I'm not even a native Tennessean. Was I unqualified, as this writer strongly implied, to discuss the doings of South Knoxvillians? How qualified, for that matter, was she to talk about this stuff?

While people tend to regard their living rooms, houses, and neighborhoods as their own, they aren't really. I imagine most people possess equity in that part of their living room sitting under the couch, with the rest owned by a bank or mortgage company.

And, of course, the South Knoxville Kroger isn't the aggrieved letter writer's Kroger, my Kroger, or South Knoxville's Kroger. It's owned by a big corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.

A while back, the South Knoxville Kroger had some very nice trees planted in front of it. One month every single tree was cut down and gas pumps were installed in their place. I live in South Knoxville and shop at the Kroger, and I liked the trees. I don't even object that much to the gas pumps. But nobody from Cincinnati asked me beforehand if it was OK with me if they chopped down the trees.

South Knoxville doesn't even belong to South Knoxvillians. If some out-of-town businessmen decide to level one of our hollows and throw up some ugly apartment complex, as they did recently in my neighborhood, that's the way it goes. I imagine the Cherokee also enjoyed the privacy afforded by our hollows until Andrew Jackson decided they would better enjoy the privacy provided on the plains of Oklahoma.

The hold we have on our homes, our families, our neighborhoods, our lives is tenuous. That's the way life is. It's pretty scary. That is why, as the letter writer pointed out, people take pride in five generations of ownership of a South Knoxville home. That is why we cling to the familiar as if it were part of us. That's why we defend our grocery stores against the snide remarks of others.

That's why I'd better watch my step. I'm the outsider who walks the aisles where every shopper is a stranger, where no neighborhood is my own. I can't let down my guard--I'm in groceries.