Author: Ellis Stevenson

The first thing the building tries to tell you when you walk into any large supermarket on a Tuesday afternoon is that everything inside was alive yesterday. A fine misting system that hisses on a timer makes the produce section shine. The lettuce appears to have been harvested at dawn. No real farmer would ever arrange the strawberries in this manner. As you pass those displays, you get the impression that the entire space is performing for you. Of course, most of it is untrue. The apples in the bin were most likely picked in the fall of last year…

Once you pass Lake Trasimeno on the autostrada heading south from Florence, the scenery starts to change. The towns sit higher, the hills narrow, and the billboards become fewer in number. Tuscany’s tour buses never stop passing through Umbria, which has always been its quieter sister. It turns out that the silence is intentional. Locals have been defending, debating, and sometimes fighting over it for decades. You’ll understand what I mean if you visit Perugia on a Wednesday afternoon. When they first opened, the escalators that ascend through the Rocca Paolina—the Renaissance stronghold now buried beneath the contemporary city—were a…

Somewhere in a museum, there is a jar of honey that has survived the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and this century. When it was uncovered a few millennia after being buried with a pharaoh, it resembled honey on a kitchen shelf in 2026. When I first read it, that particular detail stuck with me. Not because of the honey itself, but rather because it suggests that some of the most commonplace items in our pantries are actually the oldest records we possess. Stone and parchment are popular resources for historians, but they are not as durable…

A certain type of moment occurs in the produce section of a supermarket, usually around six o’clock in the evening, when the lights are bright, and the apples appear eerily alike. A shopper, such as a woman in her thirties carrying a basket, picks up an apple, turns it in her hand, and replaces it after noticing a tiny brown freckle close to the stem. She chooses another. And one more. She eventually locates the one who has no marks at all. She probably doesn’t realize that she just carried out the most significant ritual in contemporary food economics when…

Somewhere in a packing shed in Lincolnshire, there is a cauliflower in a crate that will never end up on a grocery store shelf. It has an off-white tint that caught the grader’s attention in a split second, a small bruise near the stem, and is marginally smaller than its neighbors. It ends up in the reject bin. Beside it was a carrot that resembled a pair of crossed legs; it was culturally invisible, technically edible, and nutritionally the same as the rest of the harvest. On every continent, this type of moment occurs millions of times every day. It…

The food isn’t the first thing you notice when you walk through the produce section of any big supermarket—the lights are a bit too bright, the misters hiss on cue. The geometry is the problem. Bell peppers arranged in neat rows of matching red, apples stacked like pool balls, and cucumbers so homogenous they nearly seem artificial. That’s due to more than just taste. Architecture is what it is. An asymmetrical pepper is a problem in the produce aisle, which is a display designed to perform abundance. In a sense, supermarkets are as much a part of the image industry…

Somewhere in central California, a bruised pear that no one wants is sitting on a loading dock. It only has a tiny brown freckle close to the stem. It tastes good. It was grown, picked, and packed by the farmer. After looking through a spec sheet, a buyer from a chain of supermarkets concluded it wasn’t attractive enough. It ends up in a composter, cattle feed, or occasionally the ground. You begin to grasp the peculiar, unsettling economics of what is eaten and what is not when you multiply that pear by a few billion. That was meant to be…

The first thing that comes to mind when you walk through the production floor of a Parmigiano Reggiano facility in Emilia-Romagna on any given morning is not the smell, though it is noticeable—it is warm, sharp, and almost medicinal like aged cheese. The silence surrounding the rejection process is what gets to you. Wheels that have developed the incorrect weight, rind texture, or hollow sound when tapped are marked, set aside, and separated without ceremony. No one disputes. No one goes into great detail. The standard is known. Since the answer has not changed since it was negotiated centuries ago,…

The sizzler, which smells of char, butter, and something appropriately decadent, arrives at the table trailing smoke. In a dimly lit South London restaurant, two people are seated across from one another. Based on their careful attire and somewhat formal stance, it is obvious that they are on a date. One reaches for a phone before the other picks up a fork. The other is waiting. The food cools. Contentment takes over the moment. This scene is not uncommon. In actuality, it is now so commonplace that it hardly qualifies as unusual. Dinner’s true purpose changed when, at some point…

Almost everyone who has watched a lot of documentaries in recent years has experienced the moment when something in a frame doesn’t sit quite right. The light is too uniform. The movement of a crowd loops almost imperceptibly. A half-second is too long for a face to maintain its expression. You shake it off, blink, and continue to observe. However, the doubt has already surfaced and is persistent. It turns out that the quiet uneasiness is not paranoia. It is the perfectly reasonable reaction of a viewer gradually realizing that the agreement it previously had with documentary filmmakers has been…