We are living in the future and we find it boring. The best place to gather evidence for this claim is the supermarket. To begin with, try and have a fresh look at the word: Supermarket, it is such an utterly futuristic word, yet we use it mindlessly. If only the supermarket wasn’t such a mundane part of our life, we would realize how exceptional this environment really is.
By KOERT VAN MENSVOORT
As an experiment, imagine we would take a caveman – the hunter-gatherer type that lived 40.000 years ago – and put him in a time machine with the final destination: the supermarket around the corner of the street where you live. Surely our friend the cavemen would be astonished after opening the capsule.
Overwhelmed by the hi-res environment of saturated colors he would likely assume he was no longer on Earth. The vast majority of objects in the shop would not make sense whatsoever. Body lotion? Shaving cream? Washing powder? No thank you. Except for the fruit department – which is merely stunning by its huge variety – the majority of the food products would not even be recognized as food. Coke bottles? Cereals? Toast? Milk from carton packages? Powdered soup? Sausages? All mysteries.
Possibly the meat department could bring our cavemen into an understanding and appreciation of our 21st century consumer culture. As far as he would recognize the meat as meat – nowadays it has become so abstract we hardly recognize the animal in it anymore – he would find the availability of preprocessed chopped pieces quite an improvement on his own painstaking food production efforts. Hunting & gathering is easy in the supermarket: Stone axes and javelins are replaced by shopping carts. Just run around and gather the stuff you need.
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