Eating "Healthy" in the Suburbs. Part 3: What Giant Got Right

When I started buying my own groceries it was in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., and I was spoiled for life. I was within a few miles of Bethesda, where Mr. Cohen was still making Giant Foods a great supermarket. 

Giant changed considerably in the decades after it became a big corporation. I remember once making a list of thirty ways it had changed for the worse even by the year 2000.  But while the Giant Food stores were a privately owned chain they had some features that all grocery stores should have, but few do.

1. They were budget-friendly. Bethesda is not a budget-friendly city but Mr. Cohen never forgot that his target demographic included students and interns, and Giant was a great blessing to those people while I was one of them. Before Washington had heard much about Wal-Mart, Giant sold nationally recognized brands for "the Wal-Mart price," the lowest regular price on the market. My weekly grocery budget was ten dollars. If I wanted to get through a week on five dollars, as it might be because I wanted to donate food to the church food drive, I could do that, and did. After all, six cans of vegetable soup routinely went on sale for a dollar, two big bagels cost a dollar, enough vegetables to serve four normally cost about a dollar (sometimes less), a loaf of bread cost less than a dollar, a jar of jam or peanut butter cost less, eight cups of flour or cornmeal cost a dollar, a quart of fruit or vegetable juice cost a dollar or less...

2. What was prepared in the store, or sold as a store brand, was kosher. That matters, even if you're not Jewish. Apart from having inspired some peculiar work-arounds in various Jewish culinary traditions, kosher means a clean kitchen and good-quality food. 

Canned fruit and vegetables are normally the damaged produce. Most supermarkets will sell fresh fruit and veg only if they look perfect, not only fresh and unbruised but conforming to some frankly silly uniform standards of size and color. Perfectly good cucumbers, which aren't sold for canning, are left on the ground to rot on many farms because the cucumbers in the store have to reach the right height and diameter--and shape, the supermarkets demand a uniform oblong shape--and cucumbers naturally grow with more diversity than storekeepers want to display. It's not that a shorter, longer, fatter, or thinner cucumber, or one that grew in a curved rather than straight shape or grew thicker at one end, tastes different from the ones the supermarkets sell. It's not that these "irregular" cucumbers are really ugly, though "Ugly Fruit and Vegetables" was the name of a campaign to prevent these produce being wasted. It's that supermarkets want a fixed price and don't want to leave room for shoppers to start haggling, "If this big cucumber costs 25 cents then this little one ought to cost 20 cents." 

But the bruised peach, the apple that landed on the sharp stone, the ear of corn with the earworm? They went into cans. As a result, even though canned vegetables used to be preserved with generous amounts of salt and taste more like salt than like fresh vegetables, sometimes the salt failed to disguise a nasty taste of mold or spoilage that used to turn children against vegetables for years. 

Giant Foods' canned veg, however, had to be insect-free, fungus-free, perhaps odd-shaped but otherwise good enough to eat raw. I ate a lot of canned veg as a student because I liked them.

3. Giant knew their market. The Takoma Park, Silver Spring, and Hyattsville stores, for example, all stocked all the Seventh-Day Adventist specialties, which in those days had not sold out to big corporations and were still produced by students at varioua Adventist schools, as student labor jobs. Stores in neighborhoods where a lot of diplomats lived offered all their favorite imported foods. Stores in neighborhoods where a lot of people were into "health food" stores stocked blackstrap molasses and nutritional yeast. 

Into the 1980s the Maryland suburbs outside the Beltway were rural. (Into the 1940s, even some neighborhoods in the District Proper, including Anacostia before it became "Ward 8,* were rural, agricultural--the President and Congress had to have their milk, fish, and produce fresh from their sources.) Traditionally people living in Washington would drive a few miles into Maryland, into Silver Spring or Bethesda, e.g., and buy fresh veg from roadside stands or, if it were a Wednesday or a Friday, the Bethesda farm market. In the Reagan Administration Silver Spring and Bethesda were urbanized; in the Clinton years Gaithersburg was. Traffic problems were terrible. Blaming the diplomats is an old Washington tradition but it should not be understood to suggest that the students or the tragic young people growing up in the city aren't menaces to life too--the fact that they get tickets for things like driving on the wrong side of the road, or letting the car roll in through a store window, merely means the suburb-towns get a good bit of revenue from those tickets. Roadside stands were blamed, and in fact were literally endangered, by the traffic snarls. 

So Giant stepped up and designated some stores to offer fresh local produce as it was available, reintroducing the element of surprise to grocery shopping, and allowing shoppers to buy "Ugly Fruit and Veg" at times. You had to be at the right store at the right time, say 6 a.m., to see it but you could still buy Anne Arundel produce in the suburbs. Maybe. 

Local produce matters. For one thing, when stores have the "local produce, occasionally" option open, farmers who want to offer organically grown produce are free to use genuinely organic methods. "Organically grown" used to mean no pesticides, minimal chemical fertilizers, and small batches of unwaxed, unsoaked, natural fruit and veg. Natural fruit and veg has to be fresh; otherwise it starts to rot. For people my age, at least, the idea that "organically grown" foods in supermarkets today probably contain "less pesticide residues" is unacceptable; that's not the way we use or understand the term "organic" and as far as I'm concerned, if a spray can was opened within sight of a plant after it sprouted, calling it an "organic" product is a LIE. 

For another thing, after most plant-based foods are picked, their nutrient value begins to decrease. Some nutrients are more stable than others. If you want the full nutrient value of most produce, though, you don't want to take time to cook them, or to fill a bushel basket. Fill a one-quart bucket, rinse those babies under the hose, and eat them raw. There are benefits to cooking some things--once beans develop in their pods they need to be cooked, and while tomatoes are nutritious when they're raw some of their nutrient value actually increases when they're cooked--but most plant-based food is best while it's still growing.

Corporate food packing operations have pit huge amounts of timeand money into keeping small food producers out oft he supermarkets, so Mr. Cohen was really swimming against the tide by registering "Roadside Stand" as a brand, buying the roadside stand produce, and selling it in Giant stores. But he was loved for doing it. More stores should only be doing that now.