An Anthropological Guide to Dollar Store Food
A Four-Fields Approach
Food from the dollar store is a perplexing item in contemporary
culture. The dollar - or sometimes, the 99 cent store, which feeds into
post-war Western expectations of value - is arbitrarily a 'low' price for
items. However, for food items it is often not. Many staples of the
Western diet, such as rice, bread, and milk, are available in reasonable amounts
for approximately that cost. Many of the foods found in dollar stores are
not staples, however, but rather luxury foods. Even then, many luxury
foods may be had for well under a dollar. At one large market in the
Northeastern region of the United States, it is not uncommon for chocolate bars,
of the store's own packaging,to be sold for three to five per dollar
(3.9-6.4/€), with corporately branded
specimens costing three or four times as much. Still, given the larger
quantities sold as a unit at dollar stores, luxury foods may still be purchased
inexpensively at dollar stores. The following is a multi-field analysis of
these products.
Consider the four fields of anthropology; each of these may be used in
conjunction with an economic analysis of these foods:
- Cultural
- Physical
- Archaeological
- Linguistic
Cultural anthropology is expressed in Dollar Store Food (DSF) in
multiple ways. First, is the food representative of any particular
culture? Is the packaging? Who is the DSF aimed at? All these
can be considered: age, gender, ethnicity or cultural heritage. Economic
class is a tricky one - this is dollar store food. However lowly the price
may be - a unit for a bit more than a dollar in some rare cases, or multiple
packages for a dollar in others - we may approach knowing the ideas of
class. Does the DSF aspire to a higher social class, or does it fully
admit its place in the current Western economic system?
The Physical characteristics of the food are simpler; much like
physical anthropology, you can pick it apart and it lies to you less. This
consists of the physical attributes of the food.
Archaeology and the DSF: Because archaeology is often the
synthesis of the other fields applied along another axis of space-time and
culture, we should limit our approach here to chronological measurements: Date
of purchase, date of consumption, and date of expiration. As most samples
are expected to date from after 1950, carbon dating techniques will be
useless. Relative dating, and date-stamps, will be used as means of
determining the age of the food. In some cases, production dates will be
found on the samples, and these can be used to assess changes in time.
Linguistic analysis of the samples is the most enjoyable. Most
samples will be labeled in English, some bilingually, and some are labeled in an
amazing variety of languages. Most bilingual labels are in Spanish or
French, due to the relative proximity of these cultures to the distribution
point. Others are labeled in English and the language of the country of
origin. Some, however, are labeled in such a way that makes no sense
unless the product was expected to be distributed widely, such as being flung
out of Sputnik. These variations should be noted.
For each sample, all four fields should be considered, and then a conclusion
will be written for each. Many sites like this tend towards 'rating' the
foods in the sense of their palatability, offensiveness to other senses, and so
on. In an effort to resist the capitalist and Western economic superiority
which is subconsciously present in that type of site, this site will resist
'ranking' or 'rating' the DSF samples in such a way. The only quantitative
measurement which is appropriate to the DSF is the purely economic kcal/$
(or kJ/€, according to contemporary equivalencies of the dollar and
Euro.)
