A Walk Through a Grocery Store with Mark Twain, Part 1

Mr. Twain: Shopping never starts at the door of the shop. That is a modern lie, told by sliding glass and cheerful signage. It starts at home, usually with a sentence like, “We’re out of something.” Not everything, just something small. Cheese. Salt. A lemon. A thing so modest it feels almost insulting to put on shoes for it. This is how the trap is baited.

I had invited him, of course. One must make arrangements when crossing metaphysical borders, and I thought he might be curious to see a supermarket.

We walk towards the store. He continues speaking.

Mr. Twain: At home, the need is clean. One imagines a swift errand: in, out, dignity intact. One imagines the self as a creature of intention. I admire this optimism. I once had it. You step outside with that old-fashioned appetite that doesn’t want enlightenment, only bread. It would be satisfied with a bowl of soup and a chair that doesn’t wobble.

The sliding doors part, and the blast of heated air salutes us as we walk in. He in his white linen suit. I in my thick quilted jacket, woollen scarf, beanie, and double mittens. Eternity seems to have exempted him from seasonal adjustments.

We drift toward the vegetables and fruits, where an older couple weighs oranges. The scanner beeps, and the radio tells the daily forecast. Mr. Twain stops, looks around, sighs, brushes his moustache, but doesn’t say anything for a while.

He picks up a carrot.

Mr. Twain: Look at these carrots. They are straight. Suspiciously straight. No hesitation, no fork in the body, no evidence that it ever encountered a stone or a difficult decision. A carrot like this has never struggled. It has been raised for obedience. In my day, a carrot that grew two legs was considered ambitious.

Do we need onions? We already have onions. But do we have the right onions? And did we come here for spinach, or did spinach merely happen to us last time?

Look, there is a tomato that has escaped discipline. Slightly scarred. A little misshapen. It will not be photographed for a catalogue. It knows this. That one, I trust.

Tell me — when you stand here, how do you choose the ones you accept?

Me: Mmmm, I smell them, even though all the other shoppers don’t necessarily appreciate that habit. I always keep a decent distance, though. But I have to feel the ones I’m picking. To touch them — are they raw or rotten or just perfect?

Mr. Twain: Madam, of course you smell them. Any civilisation that frowns upon sniffing a tomato has already made several other, much worse mistakes.

Smell is the last sense that marketing hasn’t fully conquered. You can’t brand a scent without risking truth. Touch and smell are dangerous like that—they report directly to the body, skipping the surface.

You see how the others pretend not to notice? That is the modern contract: “I will not acknowledge your humanity if you do not acknowledge mine.” We all stand politely beside one another, handling food as though it were glassware in a museum, never admitting that we intend to put it into our mouths.

Touching is an act of discernment. You are asking the vegetable a question. “Are you ready? Are you alive enough? Will you cooperate, or must we negotiate?”

The perfectly firm ones are often liars. Still clinging to an idea of themselves. The ones with a little give — those have accepted time. They know where they are going.

If I squeeze a peach, gently and with respect, it should respond like a good sentence: not rigid, not collapsing, but aware that pressure exists.

There is a great deal of information in the hand. More than in the label. More than in the price. More than in the earnest little sign announcing locally sourced, which, I guess, means it travelled with good intentions. So, let the others avert their eyes.

Now — shall we continue?

He sets the carrot back carefully.

Me: Next to the fruit and vegetables, we have convenience food. You didn’t have any in your days, right?

Mr. Twain: Convenience food? My dear friend, in my day hunger was the convenience.

We did not outsource eating to factories; we merely ate what was nearby. If something came in a tin, it was either a miracle, a regret, or both — and you treated it with care, the way one ought to treat anything that claims to be eternal.

What you call convenience now strikes me as impatience dressed in plastic. Meals that require no thought, no hands, no time, no mild inconvenience — only teeth and a vague willingness to forget how things used to be alive.

Look at them. Soups that have never met a bone. Sauces that have never seen a tomato in its natural state. Meals that promise home-style while clearly having never been invited into one.

Convenience, as a concept, began innocently. A shortcut here. A preserved peach there. A can to get through winter. Sensible things. Humane things.

But this — this aisle is not about hunger. It is about avoidance. Avoiding chopping. Avoiding waiting. Avoiding deciding. Avoiding noticing.

See how the packages speak to you as though you are tired before you have said a word.

No effort.
Ready in two minutes.
Just heat and enjoy.

Enjoyment has been reduced to compliance.

I will grant them this: the labels are honest in one regard. They never claim the food is good. Only that it is easy. And ease, it seems, has become the highest virtue of the modern age — above nourishment, above pleasure, above knowing what you are eating.

We had convenience once. It was called leftovers.

Tell me. Which of these items claims to be a meal?

Me: Ahahaha! Well, some of them are complete “meals”, and others are part of a meal. Take a look at the ingredient list, and see what they really contain.

Mr. Twain: Ah. Ingredients. The confession booth of modern food.

In my day, an ingredient list was a sentence long and written in a language you spoke at birth. Milk. Salt. Time. Possibly fire, if things had gone badly.

Now — now you have paragraphs and footnotes and parentheses. Words that appear to have been invented during a legal dispute.

Let us read one together, shall we?

Water. A promising start. Honest. Humble.
Then immediately: Modified starch. Modified from what, and why was it dissatisfied with its original condition?
‍Vegetable oil. Which vegetable? One hopes not a philosophical one.
‍Natural flavourings. This phrase should be illegal until it reveals what it means. Stabilisers. Stabilising what, exactly? My expectations?
‍Emulsifiers. A word that sounds like it should require a licence.
‍Acidity regulator. As though the food itself had emotional problems.

Nothing here is made. Everything is managed.

This is not cooking. It is crowd control.

And see how the list grows longer the further it gets from anything you recognised in the produce aisle. Tomatoes need no explanation. A carrot does not come with an asterisk. But the moment food forgets what it is, it must be accompanied by paperwork.

I admire your courage in reading these lists aloud, though.

What do you think — do any of these “complete meals” contain a complete thought?

Me: I’d say they contain many complete thoughts, but from process thinkers. How to make these as quick, as cheap, as easy to run through the making process as possible.

Mr. Twain: Process thinkers! Well, that explains the aftertaste.

You are quite right. These are not meals born of appetite; they are meals born of flowcharts. Each one has been thought through meticulously and felt not at all.

Observe how every decision bends toward obedience. Will it survive transport? Will it forgive reheating, twice? Will it remain recognisable even after all meaning has left the room?

This is food designed not to be eaten, but to be handled. Slotted into schedules. Consumed between obligations without interfering with them.

The thinking is industrious, admirable even, but it is the thinking of a man designing a bridge, not a supper. No one pauses mid-process to ask, “Will this make a human feel alive for fifteen minutes?”

And so the meal becomes efficient, economical, obedient — and curiously lonely. You eat it without resistance, and it leaves without conversation.

There is also this: When a thing is designed to offend no one, it nourishes no one either.

A carrot still risks being itself. This food has been carefully relieved of that burden.

Come — let us step away before it produces a pamphlet… Where next? Bread, perhaps?

Me: Yes, let’s move forward to the bread aisle. In our grocery store, it also contains the pastries.

Mr. Twain: Bread is a subject I trust far more than most men. Let me take a look at the aisle for a moment.

Mr. Twain bends over the bread.

Mr. Twain: What I see are so many kinds of bread that choosing one feels like declaring allegiance. This loaf claims to be ancient, despite being younger than yesterday. That one swears it is artisan, though I doubt any human hand has been involved since conception. Another is seeded in ways that suggest a brief but intense relationship with a forest. Somewhere among them is actual bread, trying not to be noticed.

Madam, this is marvellous: a single idea — grain, water, fire, patience — has multiplied into an identity. Here it attempts to be indulgent. There it pretends to be virtuous. Down the row it disguises itself as science. And many have been sliced in advance, as if to spare us the effort of deciding where to begin.

And then the pastries — ah yes. The sweet cousins who have given up all pretence of being necessary. They know exactly what they are and make no defence. I respect that. A pastry does not promise longevity or balance or restraint. It says, plainly: “I will give you five good minutes and then abandon you.”

And you — which of these loaves do you trust to keep you company?

Me: I’m not sure if you’re very familiar with sour rye bread, are you? It’s the Finnish favourite, and maybe the one I like most. Water, rye, salt. Nothing else. Some of them are even made with sourdough starter which I love.

Mr. Twain: Now that is bread behaving properly.

Sour rye understands something many foods here seem to have forgotten: that nourishment does not require persuasion. Water, rye, salt — a committee small enough to reach agreement. And sourdough! A living argument carried forward patiently, generation after generation, like a family story that refuses to be simplified.

Rye does not flatter. It does not hurry. It does not ask to be liked. It assumes you will either grow into it or remain unworthy. This is an admirable stance.

Me: And oh! I must show you this. This one you don’t know, I’m sure. It’s called rönttönen, and it’s an open-faced rye and barley pie with mashed potato and sweetened lingonberry filling. My 7-year-old loves them, he could live a week by eating only these.

Mr. Twain: Rönttönen, you said? I must sit down.

An open-faced pie that combines potato and lingonberry without apology? This is not a snack. This is a philosophical position. Sweetness and starch agreeing to coexist without one pretending to be the other. And rye and barley holding the whole thing together like sensible elders at a lively table.

In my country, we would have argued about whether this should be dessert or supper until the food went cold and everyone went home hungry. You, wisely, appear to have eaten it instead.

What I admire most is that neither the bread nor the filling tries to refine you. They do not claim to be better choices. They simply say: “This is what works here.”

There is no performance in this food. No aspiration. No marketing copy whispering about balance or guilt or reward.

Just nourishment shaped by place, weather, and long memory.

Tell me, do people still try to make this lighter or healthier, or has it been spared that particular modern violence?

Me: Heavens, no, they don’t. The rönttönen has a protected geographical indication under the EU law and I hope that will keep it untouched. Maybe some good comes from the bureaucracy?

Mr. Twain: Well, then I withdraw every unkind word I have ever said about bureaucracy — for the next thirty seconds.

A protected geographical indication! Imagine that: people rising up, once, to say “hands off my food.” No improvements, no reinterpretations, no wellness versions with chia seeds. This belongs to a place, and the place has seniority.

It is a rare and noble moment when paperwork is used to defend reality instead of replacing it.

Most bureaucracies flatten life into forms that can be stamped. This one, miraculously, keeps someone from asking whether rönttönen could be reimagined. That alone earns it a small statue.

You see, somewhere, at this very moment, a well-meaning person is trying to elevate a perfectly good food by making it portable, protein-enhanced, shelf-stable, and emotionally reassuring. This is how eggs become powders and bread becomes an accessory.

Your rönttönen has escaped because it is anchored — to soil, to weather, to memory, to people who would look a stranger in the eye and say, “No. This is not negotiable.”

That is not nostalgia. That is restraint, a much rarer virtue.

So yes — perhaps some good does come from bureaucracy, when it remembers that its highest calling is occasionally to step aside, raise a velvet rope, and mutter: “This stays exactly as it is. Move along.”

Shall we continue down the aisle, or should we pause here a moment longer and admire a people who, once in a while, refuse to improve what isn’t broken?

Me: Your choice! Now that we are here, we can stay as long as you wish. Though, I’m not sure how long I can stand here before someone assumes I’m unstable.

Mr. Twain: Let them. We are committing the gravest offence of the age — taking our time.

Let us pause right here, between the bread that still remembers fields and the bread that has been engineered to survive a minor apocalypse. This is a good place to think.

What strikes me, wandering with you, is not abundance. It is explanation. Everything here arrives with justification. Why it exists. What problem it solves. How it fits into a life that has already been made too fast.

In my day, bread did not explain itself. It merely minded its own business, and assumed you would do the rest. Now you have loaves that promise focus, joy, and occasionally moral superiority. One half expects a handshake and a testimonial.

And yet — your rönttönen does none of this. It does not pitch. It does not improve you. It does not care who you are becoming. It simply says: this is what we eat here. Take it or leave it.

I find that deeply respectable.

This store is full of foods that have been rescued from their own nature. Stabilised and corrected. Given a long future and a short present.

So if we are chatting freely, I will say this plainly: Modern shopping is less about hunger and more about reassurance. People are not buying dinner; they are buying relief from decision-making, from time, from the doubt that they might be doing life incorrectly. Which is why the most radical thing in this building is not novelty — it is simplicity that refuses to apologise.