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"Supermarkets straddle the divide between consumption as fantasy and consumption as necessity. Historically they have been central to the construction of consumer cultures in the West, if only because the supermarket is one of the most regularly visited retail environments, and because it deals with food and everyday goods. The supermarket, as we noted in the introduction, is a particularly useful retail space to study because it embodies, perhaps more than any other, the ambivalent, indefinite nature of consumption. In wandering the supermarket one enters into a continuum between enjoyment and tedium, contentment and anger." (Humphrey 143)
Necessity? Commodity?
The subject of food and consumption is surrounded by the irony of extrinsically consuming something that intrinsically is consumed. The same ambivalence surrounds the idea of the dual existence of food as both a necessity as well as a commodity. There was a time when food was a matter of survival. Hunter-gatherers looked to the wilderness in search of their means for living and small market exchanges and co-operatives provided a community outlet for goods and services. These old devices are fading in our society as we move into a modern age of technological advances and developed into a new integrated commodity market. "Access to food, health and nutrition, once considered a fundamental human right, -is now subject to the whims of the free market system."(Free Market System, Corporate Food Production).
PRODUCTION? CONSUMPTION?
There are extreme inequalities in the control over our resources. We are no longer consuming food simply for survival purposes; we are also consuming food as an act of consumption. In the present day a huge contradiction exists between food production and food consumption. Food is no longer made accessible to all people, only to those who can afford the cost of consumption. To afford these expenses people are working more so that they can consume in excess, more than they can physically handle and more than their bodies need. At the same time millions of people, unable to access food, go hungry everyday as a result of these gluttonous behaviors.
"There is plenty of food in the world. In fact each year the world produces huge surpluses of unused food..........Since we evidently have more than enough to feed the world the problem must be one of access.........Here again, most people of the rich North are favored, for example, North Americans, representing only 6 percent of the world's population by 1978 consumed 35 per cent of the world's resources (including food) - the same as the entire developing world." (Bennett 18-19)