If you teleported me to a foreign city for a day and gave me a choice between a trip to the supermarket or a museum, I’d almost always choose the supermarket. This is not (just) because I like snacks more than I like still lifes, it’s because a grocery store is a museum in its own right: a little slice of local life. And I am not the only person to brand “buying crisps” a cultural experience: “grocery store tourism” is having a moment on social media. Influencers are treating trips to the supermarket with the same reverence they might reserve for the Louvre.
This isn’t just greed in intellectual packaging. There are dissertations to be written on why you can find prawn cocktail crisps on British supermarket shelves and nowhere else. There are deep historical reasons why Germany is so obsessed with paprika-flavoured snacks.
It’s not just unusual products such as lasagne-flavour crisps (available in Thailand, apparently) that give you a taste of a place – even supermarket layout can say a lot about a country. Look at eggs, for example. In the UK, they’re on a shelf; in the US they’re in a fridge. Why? Because of different salmonella management strategies. Americans wash their eggs, which removes a protective cuticle. So then they compensate for that by spraying the eggs with oil to stop bacteria seeping in – after which they’re forced to refrigerate them. In the UK, and a lot of Europe, egg-laying hens are vaccinated against salmonella and their dirty eggs go on unrefrigerated supermarket shelves.
I wish there was a similarly logical explanation for why French supermarkets are filled with rows of utterly disgusting, unrefrigerated, ultra-high temperature (UHT) processed milk, but there doesn’t seem to be. Anyway, you wouldn’t get these same insights into international agribusiness practices from staring at the Mona Lisa now, would you?
Of course, the very best thing about supermarket tourism is how authentic it is. No annoying tourists taking selfies. Just you, some local people and a bunch of gen Z influencers filming a TikTok.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
