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Flow

Supermarkets and the
Movement of Food and People

Sadler Seminars, 2015-6: Programme

Programme

 Supermarkets optimise the flow of goods and people. These shops are different because so many of their main commercial innovations, from the trolley to the self-service counter, help people not to linger but to leave. At the heart of these smart and intuitive organisations is a pursuit of efficiency—a coordinated effort to allow as many goods as possible to flow as quickly as possible into as many homes as possible. Yet the pursuit of this optimum flow is imperilled by its own success. The inviting emptiness of the supermarket’s aisles vanishes as more and more customers are drawn into it; the restocking of shelves, both overnight and discreetly through the day, struggles to meet demand. The supermarket’s smooth flow of food even impacts on the bodies of the customers themselves, reimposing the problem of weight over an architectural environment dedicated to its alleviation. The display manager who must attract custom to new lines and offers without clogging up the aisles as such reflects a far wider commercial tension in which the supermarket must always balance its promises of consumerist plenitude against the need to keep wheels turning. Those in charge of these stores know their first priority is to allow this flow to flow unchecked.

 

Our culture only follows their direction. If supermarket design represents an effort to maintain movement, helping us leave these stores quite unencumbered by all the goods we buy, then many of our leading storytellers seem simply to allow this flow to usher them back outside; judging from their work, you would never know that they sometimes shop here too. Even US and UK soap operas have struggled to capture the supermarket’s ubiquity, either focusing on street markets instead or having food materialise as if from nowhere in the fridges of their protagonists. Humanities scholarship has remained no less more silent on the matter. The few writings on the subject (sample title: The Cart that Changed the World) all adopt what Raymond Williams once called technological determinism, erasing "intention" from the "process of research and development" that shaped the rise of their subject. No professional historian or cultural critic has yet traced how supermarkets emerged from the first US suburbs or risen to their present position of global ubiquity. The supermarket that seems so unavoidable in ordinary life finds only the faintest reflection in our academic and cultural commentaries alike.

 

The purpose of our Sadler Seminars is to challenge this situation. Flow’s series of interdisciplinary dialogues is grounded in the belief that it is incumbent on our scholarship to recognise the supermarket’s cultural as well as social might—and that we must do so not despite but because such stores can seem so banal. As our final speaker, the acclaimed novelist Ewan Morrison, has said of shopping malls, such postmodern spaces might seem “boring” or “barren ground,” but in fact they present a “culture” as full of “really funny, dark” stories, and hence as meaningful, as any other. Supermarkets have transformed our relationship to food and its production and consumption, and in the process they have also transformed the way we think about our families, our bodies, our land, our communities, and our wants and desires. It is imperative that we hold these transformations to the light, reaching across disciplinary boundaries in order to gain a better understanding of this dominant commercial form. The following seminars aim to do exactly that.

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