Lately I’ve been reading the new book from the always-discerning journalist Michael Fumento, an essay into the question of why Americans are such fatties. And we are, of course; even our foremost advocate of diet and exercise, Richard Simmons, is a fatty. Fumento’s The Fat of the Land, published last fall by Viking, is a relatively slender 300 pages, but it contains, pound for pound, more fascinating information than any book I’ve consumed in the past year.
One section that weighed heavily on my mind was called “Attack of the Giant Killer Food,” in which Fumento traced the growth of various common American edibles. Ye old McDonald’s hamburger, for instance, started out at 3.6 ounces; then came the Quarter Pounder, at 6 ounces, and now we have the Arch Deluxe at 9. There’s even a Double Big Mac that probably tops a half-pound. So, too, the lowly candy bar. The conventional Butterfinger of my youth was 280 calories. Now Butterfinger comes in the “Beast” size: 141 grams, 680 calories. Other fast-food chains are offering burritos that weigh more than three pounds — a clear violation of the ancient maxim: “Never eat anything larger than your own head.”
Giantism is the great American curse, afflicting everything from architecture to government, so we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s pumping up our food as well. Fumento’s data struck me with particular force because a new grocery store just opened in my neighborhood — one of those warehouse- sized “club” stores, where a customer buys a membership that gives him the right to get foodstuffs at (so goes the pitch) remarkably low prices. As it happens, I love grocery stores; or, more properly, supermarkets. I love their clean, wide, airy aisles, flanked with glittering rows of peanut butter, pickles, and potato chips. I love the boundless bins spilling over with grapes from California, corn from Florida, and beets from Georgia. Well, not the beets. I hate beets.
But I love even the name, brimming with JFK-era vim and vigor: not just markets, but markets that are super. They never fail to impart, for me, a patriotic glow. Walking into one I always recall a college friend who, in the depths of the Cold War, married a woman from Hungary and brought her to live in southern California. On the first night he took her to a Safeway. She was struck dumb, and then burst into tears — happy team, needless to say. Here, in a quarter acre of retail space, was more toilet paper than in the entire city of Budapest. Until that moment my friend had been a socialist. But he wound up voting for Reagan.
These new warehouses are a different matter, to judge by my neighborhood ” Shopper’s Club,” or whatever it’s called. I had expected something down- market, as the advertising boys like to say, but the parking lot was filled with Land Rovers, Jeep Cherokees, Previas — all the favored vehicles of the Nike-wearing yuppie, and all with lots of trunk space. It turns out that the trunk space is absolutely essential.
For the first thing you notice about the Shopper’s Club is that almost everything on sale is larger than your own head. You want dill pickles? They got dill pickles: in six-gallon jars — and sweet crinkle cuts and whole kosher and jalapenos and pepper relish sold in the same tonnage. Hot dogs come 24 to a pack, burger meat in loaves of three pounds and up. Toilet paper is sold in a 36-count bundle too big for a man to carry. There are three- pound boxes of Frosted Flakes, and gallon jugs of Hawaiian Punch to wash down the Frosted Flakes. The portions are outlandish, dizzying. Eight pounds of frozen French fries in a single bag! When I came to a four-pound hunk of scrapple, I had to avert my eyes.
The gimmick here derives from the economies of scale: The more pounds you buy, the less you spend per pound. And so Shopper’s Club reconciles two seemingly irreconcilable American impulses; the Puritan desire to save a buck justifies the Sybaritic compulsion to consume in mass quantities. This is a kind of capitalist triumph, I guess, but at what cost? The presentation of products, for example, was once one of the glories of the supermarket. But here the goods are shoved out at you on austere steel racks, the ratchets and bolts exposed, the better to convey the sense of no-frills bargain-hunting. Pallets of antifreeze and motor oil teeter next to carton upon carton of Beer Nuts. And after you check out, of course, you bag your own purchases — just as the Pilgrims would have. And then you lug them out yourself to the back of the Land Rover, which takes you home, where you congratulate yourself on your restraint and temperance, as you tear open a three-pound bag of Lay’s potato chips. Because nowadays nobody — and I mean nobody, least of all myself — can eat just one.
ANDREW FERGUSON
