By Terry McDermott

Back in the mid-20th century, there were at many major intersections neighborhood merchants clustered together to provide anything the Eisenhower era household might desire. There were five and dime stores, stationary/card shops, drug stores and most dominantly the greengrocer, the butcher shop and the bakery. If you were lucky enough to live at a major crossing, there was perhaps a theater and, for sure, a few taverns.

Around the time when walking became a form of exercise, the supermarket with its parking lot arrived to cement the long slow decline of the neighborhood merchant. The great mounded presentations of seasonal fruit and vegetables, the hand trimmed leg of lamb in the spring and the butcher’s presentation of prime beef or choice in the meat case gave way to year round availability in see-thru plastic wrap (remember butcher’s paper?). Food began its transition from carefully presented natural art to commodity distribution in the sterile but clean and characterless environment of the supermarket chain.

One positive result was that more folks got more food for less but it came at the expense of choice. In the 1970's you could only feast your eye on Washington Delicious or green cooking apples unless you lived in New England where the Yankees refused to give up their beloved Macintosh. True, there were islands of sensibility like Treasure Island, Dean and Deluca’s, Smithfield's and the occasional neighborhood bakery. The suburbs especially though lived in a world of supermarket food distribution where the ice cream was Deans or Bresslers and meat was plastic-encased, cut by the few butchers who were mostly manufacturing standard sizes for endless displays in meat coolers.

Early on one wondered where Julia Child found the food she prepared. Did they ship it all in from France? It looked good to the eye, had real variety and could not have come from a chain store. On our first walk through Paris we were stunned that the French were still shopping at small stores that presented their wares like jewelry: very much like the old days in Chicago. String bag in hand we joined them and relearned the joys of shopping with your eyes and nose for that particular evening’s meal, like the early street car shoppers, and discovered the secret of the Parisian diet which mixes a lot of walking with small portions of whatever the butcher has decided is just right for you mixed with the fresh taste of food shipped from local suppliers. The cost, of course, helped keep our appetite in check, too.

Back home food was all pretty industrial until the day we walked into a small chain in Washington, D.C. called Fresh Fields and my bride in shock called out: “Oh my gosh, LOOK.” Before us in an interior well decorated with muraled walls and white, tiled floors rather than rather than sterile linoleum, with a sea of fresh flowers by the entrance and, most entrancing, a huge produce section presented with artful style and more choices in fresh tomatoes and apples and grapes than most supermarkets had in can goods. One moved on to feast your eyes on fresh, real fish, bakery goods and wines, It was a Foodie paradise which brought a new cultural thrust to everyday shopping and returned us back to Paris or Chicago’s old neighborhoods.

In the 20 years since that initial shock and revelation we have graduated to Whole Foods and Trader Joes. Of equal import, Jewel, Dominick’s and other chains have noted the increased margins in higher quality goods and have imitated, renovated gone organic amidst their own flowers. With a little design sensitivity, artful display and more risk at the high end, well, we may not be in Paris but it certainly has increased the art and pleasure of food gathering; putting more choice, better quality and more flowers in our homes and more reward for our palates.

Could the emergence of these new grocery outlets have also, along with the great Julia Child, have laid the foundation for the FOOD Channel, created the explosion of cook books and cooking magazines and made wine a pillar of our culture and daily life? As a true measure of cultural change, when someone in your household says they’re going to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, do you not usually ask to tag along? We arrived at destination food shopping … what a long way from the 1970s.