OPINION

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By Andrew Eastep

Rain poured from the night sky above, pelting the pavement in a familiar pitter patter. The cold whipped across the bare ground. I began shuffling my notepad under my jacket, trying to keep it from getting soaked as the neon lights drew me ever closer. I was about to enter the belly of the beast. The abyss that stares back. The gates of all that is unholy.

A Food Lion. Photo credit: Virginia Retail via Flickr.

Food Lion.

I feel as though I’m obligated to give a little bit of background to the situation. A few weeks ago, we had “Idea Day” at The Match. This is when new articles are proposed for the next issue of the publication. I entered the class that day with the confidence of preparation, ready to get started on my next article on the surprise blizzard in Texas. Unfortunately, my confidence slowly died little by little as almost everyone in the class proposed an article about Texas. Scrambling for ideas, I reached into the far-ends of my brain, trying to come up with something to write about.

As my name was called, all that I had pulled out of the dusty confines of my head was an idea that had been baked as well as a Hot Pocket in an Easy Bake Oven. 

“I want to do a profile of a place… of a Food Lion… at nine o’clock.”

And here I was, two weeks later, trying to fulfill that covenant by finding some semblance of a story worth telling in a grocery store. Eat your heart out, Bob Woodward; there’s a new journalist in town.

Upon entering the stoic cement building on Patterson Avenue, I noticed that the place was almost entirely empty. Granted, in a time when staying at home is the new normal and ordering groceries online has become commonplace, the grocery store would be pretty empty. But that night it wasn’t just at low capacity, it was barren of people entirely. The only people in the store were the army of employees furiously restocking shelves, myself, and my dad, who was buying a gallon of milk, because why not kill two birds with one stone?

There was a bright fluorescent light coating the entire store. Everything had a dim yellow tinge, with a weak hum filling the vaguely modern building. There was this constant drone of 2000’s pop music; the type of music where the name of the song or artist is always at the tip of your tongue, but you can never quite figure it out. It was a land of contradictions, with every wall plastered with posters of savings, convincing you to buy more. There was a CoinStar right next to the Virginia State Lottery. There were no clocks on the wall. The time of day was obscured by the lack of windows. 

Food Lion might be the closest thing on Earth to Purgatory, eternally listening to Nickelback while awaiting judgement.

Frosted Flakes. Photo credit: Mike Mozart via Flickr.

I started perusing the aisles, witnessing all the affronts against nature made by the snack food industry. Stuff like Flamin’ Hot Funyuns and Caramel Coconut flavoured Oreos. Frito-Lay has infected every aisle, leading to the mouth-watering placement of bags of Chester’s Hot Fries and chicharrones next to boxes of kitty litter. The cereal aisle proved to show some other developments in the food industry. Tony the Tiger continues to advocate for youth sports while slapping his face on marshmallow cereal bars, meanwhile Nutri-Grain Bars—which feature nutrition as part of their name—have about 24% of the recommended daily allowance of sugar in one bar.

Eventually, people begin coming in, and the once lonely Food Lion was… still lonely, but now slightly less so. At this point I had given up on writing notes in my notebook and had resigned to using my phone, because, let’s face it, it’s a lot less conspicuous to type something on a cell phone than feverishly write down notes. I had this vision of grocery store police arresting me, or someone calling me out for staring at them in a weird way.

But I think my fears might have been unfounded, as I soon noticed that the patrons of Food Lion didn’t care about or notice me. They didn’t seem to care about much of anything. Most came in wearing some combination of pajama pants, Crocs, or the off-chance socks and slides.

The people who come into Food Lion at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday aren’t the ones who have big carts of stuff. They don’t come in with a plan, or a list, or hope. And if they did have hope, it died shortly after entering.

Pictured: The inside of a Food Lion. Photo credit: Virginia Retail via Wikimedia Commons.

People will either nonchalantly give a quick once-over to whatever it is they’re buying before they decide it’s good enough and plop it in their carts, or they longingly stare at it as if they were observing the face of God.

Nobody in Food Lion wants to be in Food Lion. There’s a tangible sadness that fills the air. Human interaction is almost unheard of, with everyone nose-down in their phone or their groceries. It’s impossible to recognize emotion with half of everyone’s face obscured by a mask. The most expression I could find in someone was something that resembled a smile as I passed by a young man while making my third lap past the baked goods section.

I spent close to an hour in Food Lion that Friday—which, admittedly, was more activity than my usual Friday routine of a four-hour nap. I entered hoping to find something to write about, with ambition pushing me forward. Instead, I left quiet and upset, with a gallon of milk and a can of Pringles, reflecting on how we got here.

We’re in the twelfth month of this pandemic, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say. It’s strange to think about how much people’s lives have collectively changed in the last year. As of January, 6.3% of Americans were unemployed. A drop from a peak of 14.7% in spring 2020, but still double the percentage before the pandemic.

The death toll continues to rise. As of February 28, 513,000 people had died from COVID-19 in the US. It’s hard to visualize the size of a number like that.

It’s hard not to see the echoes of the pandemic in every part of life. Many schools still aren’t open. Those that are open barely resemble what they did before March 2020.

American culture has more or less been shaped and shaken by these past months. Life takes place on a computer screen. Going anywhere requires obscuring half of your face. Interaction with other people is a remnant of our previous lives struggling to survive in this new normal.

Maybe this seems a little bit too grand for a grocery store, but it’s hard to forget when looking at the patrons of Food Lion. Everyone has been shaken by the past year, and going outside to buy a box of Froot Loops doesn’t change that.

I wanted to write this article as a joke. I thought it would be funny to see the weird things people do in the grocery store and point them out. But in times like this, there aren’t weird people and normal people. There are just people, struggling to adjust just as much as I am.

I think about the people in Food Lion and how they’ve handled the past year. In all likelihood, they’ve lost someone this past year. Maybe they’ve lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. I don’t know how difficult it was for that young man to smile at me. I don’t know what he’d been through. I can only imagine…

Watching how heated debates have become in this country, I think we’ve all forgotten how difficult these times have been for people. It’s easy to strip away someone’s humanity when you look at them abstractly. They’re just numbers or faceless statistics. But when you take a moment and look at the smaller scale, the wrinkles on someone’s forehead, the fog in their eyes, the pained smile on their face, you realize how much this has really taken a toll on people. And yet all the half-hearted ads chanting “We’re all in this together” have disappeared from television. We’ve forgotten that unity once shared too early.

But what are humans if not resilient?

Against all odds, 124,481,412 vaccines had been distributed in the US as of March 21. A situation that was all but hopeful now has a weak glimmer shining towards the future.

Does that sound cheesy? Probably.

But I’m fine with that.

We’ve been through a lot this past year. As important as it is to be mindful of our struggles, trials, and tribulations, I think we still could all use a little bit of optimism at this point.

I’m not very good at conclusions. Tying up stories neatly aren’t my strong suit. My editor, Upper School English teacher and Match advisor Vlastik Svab, called my first attempt “forced” and that it sounded like “a life lesson” (which it did). But, if I can sound like the end of a Disney Channel Original Movie for a moment, I think that we could all value a trip to Food Lion. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from the rows and rows of Lunchables and Go-GURTs.