How food consciousness shapes an industry...

[elfs]

It's funny how food consciousness and consumer pressure shapes the grocery store layout. What's hip and interesting often gets massive shelf space, whereas what doesn't sell well gets often desultory placement on a boring mid-shelf, far out of sight.

Today's example: in the staples aisle at my neighborhood grocery store (a QFC-branded Kroger outlet), there are eleven varities of rice (not including various "instant" types), some of them quite pricey in their 12-oz plastic containers with screw-on caps. There are four varieties of cous-cous. In the vegetables, there are six different varieties of potato. There are multiple varieties of sugar. There are several different kinds of salt, for Horus's sake.

And there, all alone is the staples aisle, is one lonely bag of lentils. And it was labeled as such: "Lentils."

But there are all kinds of lentils: French lentils, Spanish Pardina lentils, Green lentils (that's what was in the bag), Tan, Red, Black, and Mexican lentils. There are the Indian varieties, which are more like beans: Chana dal, Urad dal, Masoor dal, and Toor dal, among others.

Lisakit, bless her heart, found me a recipe for Masoor dal hummus (now that's a linguistic mash-up!), which is great because lentils lack an amino acid that other ingredients in hummus supply. (Saying so is close to nutritionalism, but let's back this up: cultures where the pulse (the family of plants which includes small beans and lentils) is a foundational food also eat a lot of sesame (nee' tahini), and they probably do so for a reason.)

Having to visit a specialty store to lay in a supply of these different kinds of pulses is a fun exercise, but it's also a frustrating one. It's fairly obvious that QFC is trying hard to have what its audience wants-- that's how it stays in business, after all. And most pulses last for months in cellar storage, so buying in bulk makes sense.

I'm sure QFC has a lot of vegetarian customers, however. It's in that kind of neighborhood, full of foodies and yuppies and their self-indulgent radicalized animal-lovin' children. These people aren't well-served by having the most common protein source most of the world uses relegated to a few token bags on an out-of-the-way shelf wedged between the rice and the "ethnic foods" sections.

Comments

Sheesh...

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

You can get at least two kinds of lentils at my neighborhood Shop N'Save, but I do live in a multicultural kind of suburb. I know that I've seen at least green and yellow ones there. Admittedly, it pales beside the wild magnificence of pulses available at Global Foods, which is a local ethnic foods store the size of a regular supermarket. I go there fairly regularly, as they are quite reasonably-priced on a number of staples and have a lot of things in bulk as well. Odd. I wouldn't have expected things to be quite so...white bread...in Seattle.