How to Buy Groceries without a Tricorder

With the abundance of processed foods and preservatives overwhelming the shelves of grocery stores, each trip I make to buy groceries is like an epic quest. My mission is tri-fold: (1) buy organic, gluten-free, minimally processed foods, (2) try to be kind to my wallet; and (3) try not to have a breakdown over labels, unknown ingredients, and/or the general confusion that reading the backs of several products of the same thing (but just a little different) will cause.

This makes me wish I had a tricorder.

What is a tricorder? you may ask if you’re not a hardcore trekkie. Or you may ask this if you HAVE watched quite a bit of Star Trek but can’t remember that thing that Spock carries around all the time on missions. 

Well this contraption in the picture on the right is a tricorder. And in the Star Trek universe, a tricorder is defined as a “multifunction hand-held devise useful for data sensing, analysis, and recorded data with many specialized abilities which make it an asset to crews about starships and space stations as well as on away missions.” (For more about the tricorder click here. You can also buy one here.)

As you can see in this picture below, Spock is usually carrying one. And sometimes you’ll see Bones with one as well.

Yet, while we’re close to mass-marketing a medical Tricorder, and there are apps  that can aid in grocery shopping, there’s no real way to know what exactly IS in the food we’re buying, especially if it comes in a box, a can, or plastic packaging. I would love to believe that having a tricorder would make shopping easier, since the device could just tell me what’s in my food, how much preservatives or non-natural ingredients have been added, or if all natural, just also happens to be gluten free. But alas, I must wait for that day.

In the meantime, however, I strive to be aware of what’s in the food I buy. Yet this can be incredibly difficult, and is only becoming more difficult as time moves on. Take for example Breyers ice cream:

Breyers ice cream used to be known for it’s short and simple ingredient list that included milk, cream, sugar, and the flavor ingredient (chocolate, vanilla, strawberries, etc). I even remember some of the commercials that advertised this. Yet now, even Breyers has unidentifiable ingredients. Their new list includes Tara gum, Guar gum, ice-structuring proteins, monoglycerides, diglycerides, corn-syrup and natural flavors. If you ask me that’s a big difference. And if I were to pick up such a package and read those ingredients, I would ask myself: What the frak is guar gum? And why I am eating it?

What I think are even worse, are ingredients described with familiar words, that make me think I know what they are, when really, I have no idea what they are. The biggest culprit in this category, for me at least: Modified Food Starch. What IS that?!

Separately, I know what each of these of these words mean, but together they’re just a vague label. Common sense would suggest it’s starch, made out of food, and something has been done it for it to be modified. But how are they modifying it? Why are they modifying it? Will it have an adverse effect on my health? And what kind of food is the starch made out of? Or is it even made out of food at all? Once they’ve modified it of course.

I did some googling and came up with the photo above to the right, and a general definition, of modified food starch as being any kind of grain or vegetable starch. Good luck for anyone who’s sensitive to gluten. If it says food starch, it’s probably not worth the risk. But what’s worse, is that most food has modified starches, or other chemicals and preservatives that we can’t even pronounce, nonetheless determine if they are a hazard to our health. Like Potassium Bromate. Which brings me to Walter Bishop’s thoughts on the matter. 

I tend to agree with Walter some days. There are times when I feel like grocery stores, or the companies whose products are filling the shelves ARE trying to kill us. With strawberry flavored death of nonetheless.

Strategies for Shopping in the Supermarket

So in an absence of tricorders, and only equipped with my smartphone, I have devised a simple strategy for shopping safely in the grocery store, which I will provide below. Apparently it’s all about Fringe  science.

Sort of.

In my experience, I’ve noticed that many grocery stores are set up with similar if not the same layout. Produce, Dairy, Meat, Seafood, Deli and Grains on the outside along the walls (the Fringe area), and processed foods, drinks, snacks and baking items on the inside. And to show you an example I’ve created a layout of the grocery store I go to all the time. Without any of my sci-fi biases, the layout kind of looks like this:

Curious to know how I view grocery stores through my sci-fi lens? Using my grocery store’s layout, I view grocery store space like this:

All those aisles full of processed and preservative filled foods: Romulan Space. A forbidden territory. I don’t go in there unless I must, and if I do go in there and buy processed or preservative foods (which is much more likely than outside of Romulan Space), I must be prepared for war, because my body is going to have to fight off the negative impact such preservatives and modified foods are going to have on my body and my health.

However, on the days, I’m not in the Star Trek frame of mind, and thinking more about Westerns, I view the grocery store like this:

Once again, that dangerous middle aisles space is off limits. This time as Alliance territory. From a Browncoat’s perspective, it’s better to stay away from the areas of the ‘verse that are highly regulated by an unfavorable super government (In this case particularly in the form of highly unfavorable mega-corporations, like Kraft and Blue Sun). It’s safer to cruise out on the fringes to avoid the Alliance. 

Well there you have it, when it comes to grocery shopping Fringe strategy is best. Avoid the Romulans. Avoid the Alliance. And when you can’t avoid either, for the safety of yourself and your crew: Read the ingredients lists!! If instinct or your smart phone tells you some ingredient is inexplicable, or you can’t pronounce it, avoid the Romulan and Alliance traps, and don’t buy it. Life’s safer that way.