The always-readable 3 Quarks Daily dishes it out:
Dispatches: On The Bowery Whole Foods
First, a few words on the neighborhood. Inside the door, above
a landscape of crushed-ice, a long wooden board has been affixed to the
wall, the purpose of which quickly becomes clear. Fish, having
been selected from the tank in front, sail wriggling through the air,
hit the board, bounce, skitter along it, hit the far inside wall, and
fall to the ice below to be grabbed, alive, and filleted by the staff
in back. Below the plank that ensures the fishmongers’ accuracy,
the heads of large salmon, recently detached, continue to yawn and gawp
reflexively. In front sit wooden baskets of soft-shell
crabs, porgies, shrimp of all sizes, razor clams with their phallic,
protruding siphons, and numerous flatfish, all whole and waiting for
inspection by customers who wouldn’t think of buying a fish without
checking its gills for redness and pressing its scaly sides for taut
resilience. Squeezed between the wall and the crab and lobster
tanks sits a large black bucket, nearly the size of a garbage can, from
which the topmost of many layers of frogs stare up.
Such is a typical fish stall on Mott Street, in downtown
Manhattan. But many other food shops south of Houston Street and
east of Lafayette Street, of all cuisines and nationalities, share the
stall’s intensity, if not always the sheer directness of the
relationship between people and the animals they eat that obtains
there. In the window of Despana, a newish food boutique on Broome
that specializes in Spanish delicacies such as paprikas, olives,
cheeses, and oils, hangs a salt-cured pig’s hind leg, hoof and all,
unmistakably a severed mammalian limb, waiting to be sliced into
transparencies of Serrano ham. Inside Dom’s, a nearby Italian
grocer, chickens complete with head and feet (the better to be added to
to your stockpot) lie in cases beneath gamy homemade sausages that age
hanging from the ceiling. The Essex Market’s Dominican butchers
sell goat meat and oxtails, while pig stomachs and tripe are available
nearby. Not only the Sullivan Street bakery but the Balthazar
bakery, Ceci-Cela, the Falai bakery and several others turn out
impeccable breads.
Bangkok Grocery, the city’s best purveyor of galangal, shrimp
pastes, lime leaves, fish sauces, and other Thai ingredients, is a few
blocks below Canal on the San Francisco-esque, tilted Mosco
Street. Back up on Mott sits DiPalo’s, the legendary supplier of
the best Parmigiano-Reggiano and other Italian artisanal products in
this country. Catty corner from it one can buy the city’s best
Banh Mi, or Vietnamese sandwich, at Banh Mi Saigon Bakery. (This
opinion professionally corroborated by the always scintillating J. Slab
at The Porkchop Express.)
Vegetable sellers and more fishmongers from China’s Fujian Province
line Grand Street all the way to Hester, where a right turn brings you
to Il Labatorio del Gelato, New York’s most lauded ice cream makers,
and a little beyond that a wide-ranging chocolate shop where you can
find most of the finest single-bean productions of Michel Cluizel,
Valrhona, and other chocolate titans. Next door is Alejandro
Alcocer’s excellent food shop, Orange, and restaurant, Brown.
Over another block on Grand is Doughnut Plant, where Mark Singer makes
his grandfather’s recipes using organic ingredients. And back up
to Houston sits Katz’s, the pastrami champion of New York City.
Back west a few blocks on Houston is the new Bowery Whole
Foods. Is it just me who finds still finds appending the word
“Bowery” to such amenities as pricey supermarkets oxymoronic? Or
has the word Bowery already shed its downmarket connotations, or
rather, already accrued the upmarket status into which downmarket
connotations are now magically transformed? Whichever confusing
permutation it is, the branch itself comically interrupts perhaps the
densest, most diverse, and best collection of individual food shops in
the United States. Whole Foods, the American food economy’s
answer to Crate and Barrel, is no doubt a useful intervention in most
suburban contexts in which there are thirty enormous chain pharmacies
for every good butcher or fish shop. If you live on the exurban
outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, presumably Whole Foods appreciably
increases the diversity of available food.
But on Bowery and Houston, Whole Foods represents a much poorer form
of food diversity than what is already there. And, food shops are
not just food shops: they are a solidified form of the social
relationships that obtain between people in an particular place.
The unofficial little vegetable market that pops up on weekends on
Forsyth Street under the Manhattan Bridge represents a food culture of
inspecting produce and comparing adjacent vendors for the best price:
the entire cacophony of traditional market culture. It is the
product and instantiation of the middle and working-class residents of
Chinatown. But don’t think I am making an argument about
authenticity here. Whole Foods is in no way a less natural
emanation of a different class stratum: the professional and managerial
upper-middle people who flow into downtown in increasing numbers.
These people, and their needs for organic baby food, large amounts of
wildly expensive prepared lunchtime panini and salads, exist in
symbiosis with Whole Foods. As downtown New York tilts towards
this population, and its fauxhemian pretensions, there is a natural
influx of corporate franchises with bland, do-gooder brand identities
that serve the casual American elite from Seattle to Cambridge.
But the Bowery Whole Foods tells us something remarkable about its
shoppers: how ignorant they are of where they are and how alienated
they are from food. Perusing it, the thing that impresses you
most is the pervasive labeling, the enormous amounts of information
appended to everything. Everywhere are little identificatory
notes, signs overhead, brochures on what to do with their sausages (eat
them?), glossy photos of the smiling man who supposedly dredged up your
mussels or baited the hook upon which your (always already headless and
filleted) wild salmon met its end. This is food shopping for
people who have come to trust only that which is mediated by text,
addenda, explanations, certifications. It is a website come to
life, or a piece of life for those who prefer websites: each piece of
signage functions as the hyperlink that clicks through to a capsule
review.
I once served some sliced raw albacore tuna doused in soy to a
friend. I had bought the fish not far from Whole Foods from Alex,
the fisherman who had caught it and brought it the next day to the
Greenmarket. I’m lucky to live in a city where this is a humdrum
and everyday transaction. My friend, a film producer, remarked,
“This is great! But how did it get sterile?”
“Sterile?” I asked.
“Yeah. How does it get safe to eat?”
Food? Sterile? This is the alienation on which Whole
Foods depends. In the age of hysterical warning about the dangers
of food, it comes as a surprise to find that fish can be pulled out of
the water and eaten, raw. No anti-bacterial soap or release form
required.
There is something else alienating about Whole Foods: it posits a
universe in which we are all only consumers. The holism its name
gestures towards is not the holism of a community in which buyers and
sellers know each other. Instead, it’s purely about the foods
themselves: one’s interest in food is projected as only another form of
self-interest. Industrial organic food production has many of the
same faults as the conventional food industry; it doesn’t matter.
That organic food is roughly a third the price at socialist
institutions like the Fourth Street Food Coop, or the superb Park Slope
Food Coop, is also unimportant. These neoliberal shoppers prefer
the impersonal embrace of a corporate parent, disguised as some vague
moral goodness. Yet a principle like seasonality is sacrificed to
the lure of exotic, irradiated produce available year-round. Such
are the characteristics of the so-called “foodies.” Even the term
suggests a cute and infantile hobby. And it does seem infantile
to shop at Whole Foods while all around you sits the very food cultures
about which Whole Foods’ publicity materials fantasize.
Near Orchard Street, four blocks from Bowery and Houston Street,
sits Russ and Daughters, a small shop crammed with smoked salmon, cured
salmon, salmon roe, herring, chubs, sturgeon eggs, bagels, fruits and
candies, mustards, cream cheeses, etc. It is a legacy of a time
when the Lower East Side was the world’s single densest agglomeration
of people, and Jewish and Eastern European foodstuffs were for sale
from pushcarts up and down Orchard Street. The store started on
such a pushcart, but this is no neighborhood of Jewish immigrants
anymore. Instead, Russ and Daughters has survived by becoming the
best source for smoked fish and caviar in New York City, no mean
achievement. In a way, it and shops like it have produced the
very market they now serve: the teeming Lower East Side’s taste for
bagels and lox ended up colonizing the nation.
In a world in which we’ve been socialized to distrust the claims of
brands, we paradoxically require ever greater documentations of
authenticity, ever wordier mediations between ourselves and
things. We don’t trust ourselves to be able to divine with our
own eyes what an edible object is, whether it’s genetically modified,
whether it contains omega-3, whether it’s safe for our children.
But the Lower East Side of New York has lasted against this tendency,
thanks to the richness of its cultural inheritance. It’s also
due, frankly, to intrepidness of the people who have lived here, their
lack of a need for handholding, and their willingness to seek out the
new and the strange. There is something beautiful about the fact
that the greatest smoked salmon purveyor in the country operates on the
very corner from which the taste for the foodstuff emanated. It
is a rare and appropriate historical congruence, and to me it
represents what is fascinating and powerful about the food culture of
this quadrant of New York City. Whole Foods is not.
::Tullycast:: 