Last fall, I was among the many who drove well out of my way to join the hordes who descended upon the new Fresh Market in Huntsville.

Like most who were in the store two days after its grand opening, I was a tourist, a sightseer. The small space was packed with dazed shoppers, in awe at the bright lights, the foreign foods, and the air of supremacy.

I returned to my car, eating my fancy turkey, apple, and brie wrap, drinking my green tea and feeling the Earth heal beneath my feet. As I put my sandwich back in the non-recyclable plastic container I'd purchased it in, I rethought what I had just seen.

Fresh Market was white - very white. Among its staff were primarily Caucasian workers, though uniquely, nonwhite staff members were strategically placed.

There was homogeneity in the shoppers, too. The guests in the store were primarily white, and not too many of them dipped below 30. It was painfully evident we were shopping for prestige and social position, not dinner on the table.

One woman, shopping with her parents, hollered across the store to them while perusing the meat counter: "Tonight I'll make these exquisite pork chops I found here."

That's when I realized only ever-consuming capitalists could ever eat such pork chops. When nearly half the planet is starving, many of us don't take the time to recognize how truly exquisite it is to have food in the first place.

The meat counter signs proclaimed the chicken to be "all natural." Having never seen a fake chicken, it took me a minute to realize that Fresh Market was proclaiming it didn't carry any of that packed-with-water-and-stretched-to-feed-more-mouths kind of chicken.

As I continued to munch my sandwich and watch customers go in and out of the store (where a live quartet played in the entry way, making shopping akin to concert attendance), I remembered the recent decision by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to change how it measures the number of people starving in our country.

They used to ask about hunger to get a measure of who wasn't getting fed, now we measure "food insecurity."


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