I love Trader Joe’s

I love Trader Joe’s. I didn’t even know I loved Trader Joe’s until I moved to England. I learned what every parent of a toddler knows well—taking the thing away will only make them want it more. And I want it. So Badly. In the midst of a hellish British February (aren’t they all), I would fantasize about mochi bites and dunkers, chocolate-covered espresso beans and Scandinavian Swimmers. It became a compulsion, a fatal weakness. I wanted my snackies, and I wanted them now. I craved Trader Joe’s so intensely that any American visitor toted some trans-Atlantic at my desperate plea. I felt like a dog under a table, whining ‘trader joesssss’ with a put-upon haggardness.

It turns out, Heaven is a place you can drive to. When I went home, I whirled the multicolored aisles and wondered about the aesthetic handwriting of the $4.99 sign on some dried banana chips. I wanted to caress the lovely hand that made that script. I pranced past produce and fangirled down the frozen food aisle. People tried to reach me, but Nirvana called louder. I was in the store for three hours, going on an eon. It was awesome. I saw the mini bries that I used to bring to school in my lunchbox every day. Why have normal-sized cheese when you can have it MINI!!?? But as I hauled my Santa sack full of snacks past TSA on my flight back to London, the shine had dimmed a bit. Were a few munchies really worth all that pining?

At one Hebrew School Chanukah party, my brother and our friends were given free reign over a deep fryer. It is, as a general rule, not a good idea to give a bunch of tweens and teens unrestricted access to a deep fryer. As you can imagine, we had an awesome time. Into that vat of bubbling gold went anything that looked remotely edible. From the more normal Oreo to the gummy worms and the bits of leftover pizza. Almost nothing that emerged from its oily mikveh tasted better than when it went in, but that wasn’t the point. The point was discovery, weirdness, novelty, goddamn it! Trader Joe’s is a master of novelty. No matter what you are looking for in the grocery store, Trader Joe’s will heighten your experience with a swirl of bright packaging and an unexpected flavor profile. Chocolate Hummus, “Cacio e pepe” cheese puffs, French onion soup popcorn — you might not actually like what you are eating, but part of the fun is being dazzled enough to think, why not? And chuck it in your cart as if it were a Hebrew school deep fryer.

Trader Joe was, to nobody’s surprise, a savvy businessman. In 1967, Joe Coulombe opened the first Trader Joe’s in California to meet the niche but growing subset of the intelligentsia who wanted slightly nicer groceries but couldn’t necessarily afford them. His ideal audience, he told the LA Times, was “a person who got a Fulbright scholarship, went to Europe for a couple of years and developed a taste for something other than Velveeta.” Reader, it’s me. Trader Joe’s hits that perfect sweet spot of slightly elevated but unpretentious. Loving Trader Joe’s is loving something thoughtful, joyful, and tasty that is also generally accessible.

In America, Trader Joe’s represents the idealized grocery store experience. There’s a persistent rumor that Trader Joe’s trains its hotter-than-average staff to flirt with customers. The produce feels a bit less expensive. The experience and ambience are downright cozy. When you contrast that to the eye-popping prices in Jeff Bezos’ Whole Foods or the clinical aisles of Hannafords (insert your regional grocery chain) or the hangar-like Walmart where you can buy your three pounds of genetically modified beef-like object with a side of gun, Trader Joe’s feels like going to a cross between Granny’s house, a farmer’s market, and the least aggressive California co-op. It’s friendly, and it markets itself as natural. In an America defined by income inequality, where some 40 million people live in food deserts, and others pay $21 for a smoothie at Erewhon, Trader Joe’s sits somewhere in the aspirational middle. Classy, but not crazy. It’s a rapidly disappearing niche.

In my first months of living in England, I was a professional mold-grower. I could spawn spores like you wouldn’t believe. Two minutes after putting some spinach in the refrigerator, bam! Green slime mold variety. If I looked at a grape strangely, it would spurt a cap of white fuzz like a fashion statement. Even my mold grew mold. I was simply not used to the way that British produce ages, which is far faster without the preservatives (cue the chorus of duh!). I wasted a lot of food before I trained myself to shop more, buy less at each go, and eat things quickly before they turned. This is a much more natural relationship to food.

Before, my family would fill a giant grocery cart and tote it all home: apples the size of my face that would be good for three weeks in the fridge, and meat that could also stay edible for weeks, years if frozen. But that’s not normal. Food comes from plants and animals, things that have life cycles that don’t just stop once we decide we might someday want to consume them. We’ve become so divorced from what real food looks and tastes like, and how long it should reasonably stay fresh. England isn’t even known for particularly good produce and groceries, but the difference was stark. My groceries from Tesco and Sainsbury’s were a bit more misshapen, a bit less uniform, and they’d go bad all the time. Is this adulthood? Looking at my neon-colored Snacks representing a Noah’s ark of shapes and thinking: is this really food?

I’m learning to grocery shop for myself for the first time. I’m living abroad long-term for the first time. Food is a staple of culture and is often linked to nostalgia. As Anthony Bourdain once said, “Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma.” I didn’t expect to feel homesick in England, and for the most part, I don’t. But it’s often food that gets me. I mean, I’m not yearning for bagels all the time, but it’s darn close. I’d say every five to six hours, I think about a pillowy yet chewy everything bagel with lox, cream cheese, red onion and cucumber. If England has a passable bagel, I have not yet found it, to my endless disappointment. But while the fixation on bagels could be explained as a diluted longing for a robust Jewish community, the Trader Joe’s thing is a bit different, and a lot more political. My craving for Trader Joe’s is a mix of nostalgia for my childhood now over and for an America that is increasingly irreconcilable with its current administration.

I was averse to returning to America after moving abroad. From August to April, I chose not to come home, spending a memorable winter break from grad school traveling in China, Japan, and France. America is a mean, unempathetic place right now. As the great American expat Henry Miller once wrote, “It’s best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture postcard which you look at in a weak moment.” From England, it was easy to see how my home country’s disregard for human life had been grating on all of us. I didn’t want to go back, especially as the situation seems to be getting worse. Trader Joe’s was one distinctly, contentedly American thing that I could get excited about. But like most of America, it’s defined by artificiality and inextricably bound up in the things—the commodification of everything, the performativity, the underlying elitism—that make America a big, difficult mess. People here in England seem to get those contradictions. The Trader Joe’s tote is a status symbol here. A way to tout a woke American brand that has clear utility, a beachy vibe, and ostensibly positive values without endorsing the whole America hullabaloo.

The tote, and the brand behind it, represent a fading America, one that values sturdiness and whimsy, that can fit on the arm of a mom taking her towel and prosecco to Mnemsha Beach or in the Subaru of a 20-something going climbing in Colorado. But it also represents America as it is. As more than one influencer has pointed out, the stores seldom open in predominantly Black neighborhoods, despite a demand for affordable groceries. Conceived of as a modern trading post, the shops also received significant flak for their racially tinged branding on so-called “exotic” foods like potstickers and tortillas. It is a place for that Fulbrighter—who was always going to return to the USA to build an upper-class suburban comfort—to recall the allure of travel without the investment in local cultures and flavors. As much as I love Trader Joe’s, I recognize its artifice and its subscription to the consumerist melting pot whereby everything that can be bought must. And the pretty packaging serves to get me, the white, suburban, one-time expat who visits the Cape and likes hiking, to keep adding to the cart.

When I went home in April to restock—ahem, to see my family—I went totally overboard. I told myself I was purchasing a bunker-load of Trader Joe’s for my poor British friends. How sad! They’ve never even heard of a “Trader Joe’s Taki!” No matter if they have no frame of reference for real Takis. Doubly so, no matter if I don’t even like either snack. I had to import them across borders for the event of the taste test. We tried them; we had thoughts. It was a fun 30 minutes of gleefully ripping open packaging and thrusting various clumps of sugar and salt into my friends’ slightly skeptical mouths. But then snacktime was over. I hauled the haul back to my room and pondered what to do with the leftovers. Good thing they wouldn’t go stale for a few weeks. I looked ahead to munching on overly sweet, strange bite-sized things for the many moons to come and felt disillusioned.

But then I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2, a capitalist workplace horror masquerading as Dior copy, and I brought all my snackies. As Lady Gaga made the body-ody-ody shape with her hands in front of Donatella Versace, I thought about capitalism. I put a few more Mochi Bites in my mouth and thought about the desperation of the attention economy that increasingly writes movies premised on the audience’s distraction. The movie itself felt choppy and obvious. America lionizes celebrities, luxury companies, and, to some extent, the journalists, creatives, and movie makers that this sequel pays homage to, as the peak of our soft power. But this sequel to a beloved movie is as substance-less as a bag of Doritos.

Trader Joe’s and TDWP2 both represent a high gear of consumerism. The goal is to sell, and the product is nostalgia, creativity, and a hint of worldliness. But the movie took art, fashion, and writing and took out the heart, the urgency, in favor of a sidelong techno-feminism. The characters have learned nothing, save for how to dress. At least Trader Joe’s still maintains a quirkiness and a unique core that, for now, delivers on what it peddles.

I crave things that are original. Imperfect and quirky. I want to consume that which is both lovable and detestable, not meh-flavored slop. I am too young to really know a time when media was media-free, but I am still allowed to demand things that I haven’t seen before, new ideas, new flavors. It’ll be flawed. It’ll come in too much packaging, and it will feel kitschy. It will deceive me into spending too much money on things with strange spice profiles and not enough nutritional value. But at least it will be fun, surprising, and different. I want Trader Joe’s.