All posts tagged: grocery stores

What Tucker Carlson Saw in Moscow

What Tucker Carlson Saw in Moscow

Published by skeptic

Tucker Carlson went to Moscow last week and had an absolute blast. He rode the subway and marveled at its clean cars, the fancy tilework in Kievskaya Station, and the lack of booze-drenched hobos. He went to a grocery store and was astonished by what ordinary people could apparently buy. He even managed to meet a local history buff and sit down for tea and conversation. Carlson, who had never previously visited Moscow, declared himself “radicalized” against America’s leaders by the experience. He didn’t want to live in Moscow, but he did want to know why we in America have to put up with street crime and crappy food when the supposedly bankrupt Russia provided such a nice life for its people, or at least those people not named Alexei Navalny. My former Atlantic colleague Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel a “fool’s paradise,” but not all forms of foolishness are equal. Many commentators have guffawed at Carlson’s Russophilia and pointed out that Russia’s murder rate is roughly that of the United States, and that its …

Readers share the state of their local journalism

Readers share the state of their local journalism

Published by skeptic

“It is painful to watch as our once-proud newspaper has become a shell nearly devoid of meaningful content,” one reader says. Homer Sykes / Alamy January 31, 2024, 6:05 PM ET Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week, I asked readers, “What is the state of local journalism where you live, and how does it affect your community?” Replies have been edited for length and clarity. Ralph, who didn’t say where he lived, shared a concern that I heard from readers all over the country: It is painful to watch as our once-proud newspaper has become a shell nearly devoid of meaningful content. I keep hoping the local-news business will hit bottom and begin a long, slow climb back, but I don’t see any sign of that yet. I wonder when people will begin to feel a need for local news and be willing to pay for …

The Last Days of the Barcode

The Last Days of the Barcode

Published by skeptic

Once upon a time, a restless cashier would eye each and every item you, the consumer, purchased and key it into the register. This took skill but also time—and proved to be an imperfect way to keep track of inventory. Then one day, a group of grocery executives and inventors came up with a better way: what we now know as the barcode, a rectangle that marks items ranging from insulin to Doritos. It’s so ubiquitous and long lived that it’s become invisible. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, editor Saahil Desai gives an early obituary to a monumental and fading technology. Desai walks us through the surprising history of the barcode, from its origins in the grocery business to Walmart and Amazon (with a detour to the movie Deep Throat). The barcode allowed grocers to stock infinite varieties of everything, which led us to expect infinite varieties of everything and made us the highly demanding and sometimes addicted shoppers we are today. We talk about the barcode and the technology that is about to …

Gluten-Free Pasta Could Be So Much Better Than This

Gluten-Free Pasta Could Be So Much Better Than This

Published by skeptic

To my grandmother, who has lived her entire life in Italy, gluten-free pasta is “una follia”—nonsense, madness. A twirl of spaghetti or forkful of rigatoni should provide a familiar textural delight: a noodle that is both elastic and firm, holding a distinct, springy shape that your teeth can sink into with some, but not too much, resistance. That is all because of the gluten in wheat. Upon taste-testing some popular brands of pasta made from ingredients such as rice, corn, and chickpea flour, I understood my grandmother’s doubts. The various noodles retained a firm, if not al dente, shape at the lower end of their packaging’s recommended cook time. But approaching the upper end of the range, the noodles became soft and eventually collapsed; penne ripped in two by the time it was on my fork. Even when the noodles didn’t turn limp, they were almost sticky against my teeth. And the pastas had faint aftertastes: of overcooked rice, of tortilla chips, of chalky chickpeas. When paired with a sauce, these defects were less noticeable—but …

How Humanism Can Save the World

How Humanism Can Save the World

Published by skeptic

One evening not long ago, I was doomscrolling on social media, wading through the detritus of our present moment: Videos of terrorists in Israel decapitating a man with a garden hoe. A clip of Donald Trump being cruel and narcissistic. Footage of mobs physically assaulting some lone stranger they disagree with, pummeling him as he lies prone on the ground. These are all products of the rising tide of dehumanization that has swept across the world. The famous dates of our century point to this great unfolding of barbarism—September 11, 2001; January 6, 2021; October 7, 2023. The causes of this rising culture of dehumanization are almost too many to count: tribalism, racism, ideological dogmatism, social media. All this amounts to the steady evisceration of the moral norms that can make our planet a decent place to live—and their gradual substitution with distrust, aggression, and rage. Dehumanization is any way of seeing and acting that covers the human face, that refuses to recognize and respect the full dignity of each person. Then, as I was …

Supermarkets are more than stores

Supermarkets are more than stores

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. “I don’t remember my first visit to Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but I do remember my first trip to Fairway,” Bianca Bosker wrote in 2020 of the grocery store in New York City. She continued: My grandmother, who had been forced to flee her home in what was then Yugoslavia during World War II, had spent nearly two decades as a stateless person … Fairway, to her, was a place of surreal abundance. She could roll her black-metal grocery cart down the hill and roll it back up stuffed with old- and new-country fare: an Entenmann’s Danish ring, Kraš Napolitanke, Thomas’ English Muffins, Hungarian salami, panettone, hot dogs, ajvar, cornflakes. And the deals! She’d sit me down at the kitchen table and, beaming, haul out new brands of wafer cookies to marvel at how little …

The Sriracha Shortage Is a Very Bad Sign

The Sriracha Shortage Is a Very Bad Sign

Published by skeptic

For more than a year, life for many sriracha lovers has been an excruciating lesson in bland. Shortages of red jalapeños—the key ingredient in the famous hot sauce—have gotten bleak, in particular for the ultra-popular version of the condiment made by Huy Fong Foods. Grocery stores have enforced buying limits on customers. Bottles on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon are selling for eye-watering prices—as much as $50 or more. A few Americans have grown so desperate for their flavor fix that they’ve started pilfering the sauce from local restaurants. A big part of the shortage can be blamed on Huy Fong’s fragile supply chain. The red jalapeños that give the sauce its citrusy-sweet heat are finicky about temperatures, and are usually laboriously picked by hand. A huge portion of the peppers are also grown in particularly dry parts of northern Mexico where many fields are irrigated with water from the Colorado River—itself a strained and highly-contested resource. But all of that was just a teeing up, experts told me, for a final climatic blow: the punishing …

What Will It Mean to Drive an EV in a More Extreme Climate?

What Will It Mean to Drive an EV in a More Extreme Climate?

Published by skeptic

Every Texan I know has what you might call “grid anxiety,” a low-humming preoccupation with electricity that emerged after brutal winter storms kneecapped the state’s isolated power grid in February 2021. That frigid disaster triggered highway pileups and runs on grocery stores; people inadvertently poisoned themselves with carbon monoxide by running grills and cars indoors to keep warm. My hometown of San Antonio, like so many places across the state, simply wasn’t equipped to deal with several days of freezing temperatures. Many factors contribute to a disaster of this magnitude, but the fundamental failure of the state’s energy infrastructure can’t be overemphasized. Extreme cold is one end of the spectrum. Texas reached the other this summer, as record-breaking heat enveloped the South. Now my conversations with folks back home inevitably lead me to ask, “Is your grid up for this?” So far, the answer has been yes, thanks in part to a substantial expansion of renewable energy, particularly solar power, in the state. But energy is not straightforward: Additional solar capacity will get us only …