Practicing Temperance at the Grocery Store
October 2022 Granola Newsletter
In a September Substack post, Alan Noble considered the dehumanizing aspects of the self-checkout line at the grocery store:
…[S]elf-checkout allows you the freedom to complete your transaction with a machine. But the cost of this freedom from other people is constant surveillance. The self-checkout machine has a camera and monitor attached at the top to remind you that everything is being recorded. … Before you can leave, an employee must check your receipt to make sure you haven’t stolen anything. We’ve freed ourselves from the tyranny of talking with a checker and all it cost us was the presumption of innocence and all human warmth.
This whole experience is predicated on the idea that we are each our own, that we are ultimately only responsible for ourselves and to ourselves. And that means that we don’t owe anyone anything unless it’s contractually or legally defined. The store’s only obligations to you are legal. Their only responsibilities are to profit. When treating customers, employees, or producers as human beings leads to greater efficiency, then they will do so, but only then.
I read Alan’s post very soon after a trip to Costco—my first trip since moving back to the U.S. His post focuses on the experience of atomization cultivated through the contemporary grocery store’s neglect of social interaction and engagement. But as I perused the aisles at Costco, I was thinking about another, vital aspect of being human that is oft neglected in our everyday shopping experiences: the practice of virtue—particularly, I would argue, the practice of temperance.
Temperance is one of the cardinal virtues. For the Greeks, it applied directly to the exercise of restraint over our appetites. The Greek word generally translated as “temperance” is sôphrosune, which refers to self-restraint. Alisdair MacIntyre suggests that for the Greeks, the temperate individual has “the quality of knowing how far to go on a particular occasion and when to pause or temporarily draw back.”[1] In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, Chapter 12, Aristotle suggests,
… [I]n an irrational being the desire for pleasure is insatiable even if it tries every source of gratification, and the exercise of appetite increases its innate force, and if appetites are strong and violent they even expel the power of calculation. … Hence the appetitive element in a temperate man should harmonize with the rational principle; for the noble is the mark at which both aim, and the temperate man craves for the things he ought, as he ought, and when he ought; and this is what rational principle directs. [Emphasis added.]
Many contemporary middle-class individuals live surrounded by excess. The cost and availability of nutritious ingredients, especially for those living in food deserts or food-insecure homes, is still a massive problem and must not be ignored. Our practice of temperance must be balanced with the virtues of generosity and justice, so that others receive access to the food they need. For those of us privileged enough to have easy financial and geographic access to the food we need, however, the cheapness and abundance of goods at our disposal can predispose us to gluttony.
If you’ve gone shopping at a big box grocery store, it is possible you may have—at least once—walked out with ingredients and items you did not intend to purchase. Perhaps you spent far more money than you intended to. Perhaps you bought ingredients that rotted in the back of your fridge, forgotten and neglected, until you eventually rediscovered them and threw them away. Or perhaps you decided to take advantage of a store deal by buying up more of a product than you actually needed.
For my part, I have loved Costco’s pesto and big blocks of Dubliner cheddar cheese since I was a child. They are the reasons I tend to go back (and back). But I never walk out of Costco holding two items. Do you? If so, you are a far more temperate person than I’ve ever been.
These foibles may seem small and unimportant. But in his book The Virtues of the Table, philosopher and ethicist Julian Baggini suggests that such quotidian habits of virtue or vice shape our character in vital ways: “if we want to live well, it is not enough to know how to treat others or to master the proper use of reason and judgment. We have to work on our characters, to become the kinds of people for whom doing the right thing becomes more natural than not. The everyday is not just the best domain for doing this; it is really the only one.”[2]
Baggini uses the breakfast buffet as a site to explore human character; he sees it as “a microcosm of much that has gone wrong in our dealing with food.”[3] At the breakfast buffet, as at a big-box grocery store, we are “sucked in by the promise of plenty…. Choice, quantity, and convenience all trump quality, creating an illusion of value that in reality fails to appreciate the true value of food.”[4] These enticements trump all the values we ought to hold dear when we consider the table. But in a world overwhelmed with shiny brands, enticing deals, and cheap ingredients, it is difficult to determine the best way to consume food—the modes of buying or eating that will naturally accord with the good life.
What would it mean to become a temperate consumer? My thoughts accord with Aristotle’s three points—with an added note that the idea of temperance also would encourage some concept of positive choice and balance (as with the virtues of generosity and justice mentioned above), and with an idea of seasonality. As Karen Swallow Prior notes in her excellent book on reading and virtue,
“Temperance is more than merely restraining from vices. While restraint is one aspect of temperance, there is more to it than merely negation. Inherent to temperance is balance, as evident in the Old English word temprian, which means ‘to bring something into the required condition by mixing it with something else.’ … Temprian is derived from the Latin temporare, which means to ‘observe proper measure, be moderate, restrain oneself’ or to ‘mix correctly, mix in due proportion; regulate, rule, govern, manage.’ This word, in turn, may come from another root, tempus, from which we get the word temporal, related to times and seasons.”[5]
To become temperate shoppers, then, we are called to desire rightly. In the realm of shopping, determining what it means to desire the right things is often prudential: it’s dependent upon our bank accounts, the size of our households, the requirements of our health, and the shopping options we have at our disposal. But there are perhaps a few questions we can use to direct our shopping choices toward the good.
First: will this choice make me a good steward—of my body, my family, my finances, my community, and the soil/environment? If the choice transgresses one of these, is there an overriding important reason I should purchase it at this juncture? For instance: if organic groceries are usually too expensive, picking an item from the Environmental Working Group’s “Clean Fifteen” enables us to be good stewards of our money and health in an imperfect world. Buying organic all the time undoubtedly makes us better stewards of our environment; but we can’t pursue this goal to the detriment of our finances and families.
Second: am I shopping in the right way, and in the right place? I often wonder this when I shop online. If there is something dehumanizing about the self-checkout line, as Alan points out, surely there’s something worse about buying everything online, and therefore never interacting with the people responsible for growing, packaging, shipping, and selling our food. Shopping at a farmer’s market forces us to acknowledge and to build relationships with the people who’ve grown our food (and it forces them, in turn, to interact with us, the people most impacted by their growing decisions). Though it doesn’t have quite the same impact, certain grocery stores will build our sense of community, responsibility, and temperance more than others.
Third: is there something here that I want that I can do without? It’s not easy to return items once you’ve put them in your cart. I’ve sometimes wondered if we might be better shoppers, however, if we paused before checking out and spent some time considering the items we’ve chosen. Our willingness to say “no” to the thing we hastily grabbed in the moment means that next time, we might think twice before grabbing it in the first place. It trains us, over time, to desire things as we ought—helping us to govern our impulses and desires with greater temperance.
Fourth: is this the proper time or season for this purchase? This, too, is a prudential consideration: our ability to buy certain goods may depend on our financial resources, the amount of time we have to prep meals at home, or the age of our children (if we have children). Learning how to purchase items that are wise for the season of life we currently inhabit is something that takes time, attention, and care. But in addition to this, I would argue that having some attentiveness to the rhythms and seasons of the earth matters. To eat fresh strawberries in the summer, and not in January, teaches us temperance. It teaches us to enjoy the beauty and deliciousness of strawberries at that point at which they are meant to be enjoyed.
To buy strawberries in the summer and freeze or preserve them for the winter isn’t to ignore the call of temperance. Far from it. Temperance is not all abnegation: it’s also about embracing seasons of feasting and fasting, preparation and cultivation, in order to enjoy things rightly. To spend a weekend in the summer preserving peaches or pickling green beans is to recognize the calls of temperance and prudence, and to build habits that accord with both. It recognizes the demand of temperance that we enjoy the right thing at the right time, in the right way and right amount.
To shop temperately requires this complex awareness of the demands of stewardship, particularity, generosity, and seasonality. It requires care and wisdom. It also requires us to have a vision: to determine in our minds what a good table looks like, and how we might cultivate that table in our own, particular lives.
For myself, I believe the good table is one on which we see the right foods in the proper amount. I hope to see foods that are in their season. I hope to see foods that were grown, butchered, aged, and prepared as they ought to be prepared. Most of all, I hope to see a table that is laid with grace and prudence: a table poured out for the hungry, one in which temperance is married to the abundance of generosity and love.
What do you think it means to be a ‘temperate’ consumer?
How do you envision or define the good table?
Share your thoughts via email, or in the comments below!
How do we read news responsibly?
How do we determine what is true, and whom we should trust?
Is it possible to influence our communities and families for good when it comes to news consumption?
Join Bonnie Kristian and me on Tuesday, October 11 at 12 p.m. (EST) to discuss Bonnie’s new book, Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community. We will open the webinar with approximately 30 minutes of discussion, and then have ~30 minutes of Q&A with attendees!
You can preorder Bonnie’s book here.
news + essays
Abraham Lustgarten talks to Jay Famiglietti about the West’s water crisis, and its future impacts: “it’s impossible to keep growing the food that we grow in California. It’s agriculture that uses most of the groundwater. The math just isn’t there to have sustainable groundwater management. If you think of sustainability as input equals output — don’t withdraw more than is being replenished on an annual basis — that’s impossible in most of California.” (h/t Jeff Bilbro)
Marisa Peñaloza chronicles recent efforts to protect historic Black cemeteries—many of which stand as testament to vibrant communities that were forced, over time, “to uproot and disperse.”
Natalie Fertig and Eleanor Mueller document the horrific treatment of undocumented workers trapped on marijuana farms in the U.S.: “If you buy marijuana illegally somewhere in the U.S., there is a very good chance that it was grown by people like Isabella, Maria and Leticia. The women exist in one of the deepest cracks in U.S. labor law: undocumented agricultural workers at an off-the-books worksite in an illegal industry. … Undocumented workers on such farms face unsanitary working conditions, exposure to illegal pesticides and chemicals, rampant wage theft and the threat of violence.”
Tish Harrison Warren praises the legacy of Rich Mullins, one of my favorite artists: “His life continues to offer a model for how one can acknowledge both the reality of darkness and also the goodness of God, how one can be both honest and faithful, and how one can admit and grieve the failings in the church yet remain committed to it.”
How do we support caregivers? Leah Libresco Sergeant considers the needs and requirements of care work over at Mere Orthodoxy: “care is never a private matter, something that can be contained in a single dyad or family. Dependency creates a chain of need, which extends out into the wider world.”
food & drink
Re-sharing King Arthur Flour’s sourdough waffle/pancake recipe. Our kids are happy to have it as a regular weekend staple again.
A great way to use sourdough discard: this delicious cinnamon raisin sourdough bread.
Recipes to try: apple dumplings, pound cake with apples, roasted apple sourdough bread, and a savory gruyere and zucchini tart.
I’m lacking some links and sections today because I’ve simply run out of time, and need to devote my attention to other things. Often my allocated writing time disappears as I need to clean up messes, provide snacks, kiss scraped knees, moderate sibling fights, and keep both the dog and the almost-2-year-old out of trouble. I mention this because I hope you all will forgive me if my newsletters are occasionally inconsistent. Hopefully I can include more listening links and books in the next newsletter!
[1] After Virtue, Page 136.
[2] Virtues of the Table, pages 159-160.
[3] Ibid., page 160.
[4] Ibid., page 161.
[5] On Reading Well, page 60.
I think this is very true when we're talking about our relationship to food, the earth and the temporal significance of how we consume produce. Last year, I bought a butternut squash off season. I always buy winter squash locally and in season, a gastronomic rite of autumn and the coming winter. But I was having a craving for it, even though it was spring. Although I felt odd doing so, I gave in to convenience, opportunity and desire and put the product of Mexico in my cart.
I've been preparing & cooking butternut for decades and I'm familiar with the pressure required on the knife and peeler. But this unruly import was like cutting into concrete. It took me over half an hour to get it ready for the pot, and by the time I was done my hands were bright red and sore. And it didn't taste anywhere near like a locally grown squash - it was dry and almost flavorless. The color was a bit off, too. Never again will I buy out of season to satisfy cravings. I'm more than happy to bypass the butternut in July at the supermarket and wait until when it should be eaten in New England - fall & winter - and purchased from a local grower. Tragically, it's becoming easier and easier for any one of us to be lured by opportunity and abundance, and not only abandon the farm stand, but also the celebration of the seasons.
This is such a timely article for me. Thank you Gracy! I am living on my own again after staying with my parents during COVID, so I'm buying and preparing food for myself on a much smaller budget. It's been a real challenge and an exciting opportunity. It has forced me to reckon with my fear of scarcity and how that affects how much I buy. I feel scarcity even though I have always lived with food security and easy access to fresh fruits and vegetables as well as the handed-down knowledge of how to prepare and enjoy healthy, thrifty food. It is a work of introspection to recognize the tensions in how I approach food. I love the idea of being temperate with food, both in preparing/eating it and in sourcing it. This has given me a lot to think about and a helpful grounding in the values I want to reflect in my choices. I also love to eat seasonally and am already stocking up on winter squash from the farmer's market!