How Reality TV Explains European Grocery Shopping

Phil Keoghan, host of “The Amazing Race”, demonstrating a task in Naples, Italy.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, The Amazing Race remains one of my favorite TV shows. Even in this day and age, it astounds me that the show’s production goes as smoothly as it does, considering that the premise is a race around the world.

 Admittedly, as is the case with the great majority of TV shows that air at a discrete time, viewership is a fraction of what it used to be. Therefore, not as many people are still talking about it. Which is why I’m going to talk about it here!

 There are plenty of details behind the scenes that the average casual fan doesn’t necessarily know, such as the fact that each team has a two-person camera crew. The team must always be able to travel with their crew, including when vehicles are provided by production for self-driving. 

Of course, teams must also complete various tasks themed after the location they currently find themselves in. According to the show’s Wikipedia article, production tends to select tasks based on things residents of a given location would do as opposed to those merely visiting as tourists. And as a viewer, I believe the show is at its best when it shows what life is like in the given destination. So if that’s their goal, keep ‘em coming.

The Amazing Race has held some pretty insane challenges from a thrill-seeking perspective. The most recent season contained camel riding, skydiving, and scuba diving all in the same episode. Visually speaking, they’ve been to stunning locales all over the globe. And then there are those moments when they trick contestants, which are even better.

But one task from the most recent season of the original American edition that I think is highly underrated, if for no other reason than it tickles the ‘tism as far as urban planning is concerned, was in the ninth episode.

Here’s some background. Teams had traveled to Naples, Italy and were in the city’s historic center. I don’t want to deny that the historic center of Naples is probably gentrified beyond belief at this point, and that AirBNB is a driving force behind that gentrification. This was the same episode that contained a challenge involving folding mozzarella twists and making Margherita pizzas from scratch.

Married couple Jonathan and Ana Towns shopping for groceries in Naples, Italy on “The Amazing Race 37.”

There was a Route Info task in this neighborhood that involved shopping for locals. Teams had to purchase zucchini, bread, sausages, and one other item I forgot from a list that had been lowered to them in a bucket. (Teams were given money to use specifically for this task; perhaps begging locals for cash has fallen out of favor). The shopping list was written in Italian, which led to some teams facing a language barrier. 

On a side note, for what it’s worth, of the places I’ve been to within Europe, Italy had probably the lowest percentage of locals who spoke fluent English. At least, among the people I talked to. And to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Italy has 59 million residents to make life convenient for, and there’s nothing wrong with putting them before temporary visitors, particularly those tourists who act like Ugly Americans™. Besides, it’s always more fun when they make challenges difficult for the contestants.

 Here’s the thing that struck me about this task: The four items teams had to purchase could be found at three different stores, all within reasonable walking distance of the clue box.

Now, to those of us living in most of the United States and much of Canada, this is something you only experience if you’re visiting a different country. If you’re talking to a friend who lives in a European country, something made easier by the advent of digital technology, you might have a conversation like this:

EU: Where do you go to get your vegetables?

NA: Uh…the produce aisle at Market Basket.

EU: You mean, the vegetable store? Where is that?

NA: It’s a section of the store.

EU: Really? There’s no vegetable store?

Now, it is true that for most people, your needs as a tourist are different from your needs as a resident. If you’re eating at restaurants, you probably aren’t spending a lot of time in grocery stores.

However, the hypothetical interaction I describe above isn’t actually hypothetical. A family member of mine told me about discussing this with a friend who lives in Europe, and their exchange went more or less as shown above. Honestly, I find this an interesting cultural difference between North America and Europe, and it’s an area where I think Europe has North America beat by a light-year. (Yes, those measure distance rather than time.)

I believe one of the most important reasons for this cultural difference is related to the far higher degree of car dependency in North America. You see, car dependency seriously hinders the ability of small businesses to exist if they don’t have their own parking lots. And maintaining all the asphalt needed for a parking lot is an expense that a business that’s just starting out will have a hard time covering. In practice, it turns into a catch-22 situation.

It might not be totally impossible for a small business to survive, or even thrive, in this environment, but it’s certainly a pretty steep uphill battle. 

This is, to some extent, intuitive. When you're driving, even if it's not on a horrendous six-lane stroad, you're paying little or no attention to what's beside the road. You simply aren't. To be fair, you really shouldn't be, because you need to focus on what's actually on the road so that you don't crash. But that also means businesses beside that road aren't going to catch your eye, and they won't get as many, for lack of a better word, "impressions." Even if a high percentage of drivers who notice the business decide to patronize it (or, within the bounds of my analogy, that business garners a high "click-through rate"), most drivers aren't going to notice it, and that's a major threat to that business' profitability.

Married couple Brett Hamby and Mark Romain inside a small Italian grocery store on “The Amazing Race 37.” I posit that it’s very difficult for such stores to exist in the United States these days.

In the long run, big-box chains and supermarkets people already know about are going to dominate, because they have the biggest parking lots. If my countrymen wanted to deal with the increasing monopolies in the grocery market, changing our zoning laws (at least on new developments) would be a good start. Since it's the United States we're talking about, a country that’s become infamous for never fixing its problems when they arise, it's an open question whether that'll ever happen at any significant scale. Certainly not anytime soon. But it is at least theoretically possible.

While the contestants racing this particular leg (Season 37, Episode 9, also titled  "La Pizza d'Resistance" for anyone curious) seemed to enjoy this task, nobody commented on the urban planning principles used in most of Europe that make it possible for small grocery stores to turn a profit. Or at least, if they did comment on it, said comments were not shown in the episode. Even if European tourism to the USA is down markedly from last year (not that I think of this as a foreign tourist-friendly country even at the best of times, but that's another rant entirely), American tourism to Europe is not. 

I'm far from the first person to observe that plenty of Americans love the dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods they visit in Europe. Americans spend at least six hours, and often thousands of dollars, to travel to popular European destinations in the hundreds of thousands. There’s a sort of novelty to cities like London, Paris, and Amsterdam that people from all over the United States enjoy. But even plenty of those people don’t realize exactly why they enjoy visiting such places as tourists.

I posit that the reason is simple. Demand for housing in walkable neighborhoods, even in a country infamous for its obesity epidemic, is far higher than the supply. This is evidenced by the fact that the few remaining such neighborhoods in North America are getting more expensive to live in. That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s just the most fundamental principle of economics; supply and demand, as they say.

The Amazing Race task described above showed what is possible with the help of a nuanced zoning policy. Now, zoning exists for a reason. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, cities were notoriously polluted thanks to the sheer number of factories popping up. For obvious reasons, having a heavy industrial zone next to a densely populated residential area isn’t a good idea unless you’re a big fan of environmental racism. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have commercial properties located near to peoples’ dwellings, and in so doing find a “happy medium.”

It’s not just the economic health of small grocery stores that is hindered by American zoning practices, however, but also the physical health of many of its residents. You see, in a location with several small grocery stores spread throughout the neighborhood, one can purchase whatever they want or need for that particular day. It doesn’t feel like a chore, and it can be done in ten minutes or less if the store’s not terribly crowded.

By contrast, in the typical American suburb, because shopping is such an event, most people only do it once or maybe twice a week, buying their groceries in bulk each time. This puts pressure on those people doing the meal planning for the household, because they have to think about what they’ll cook every day that week. It can be overwhelming, and it’s not hard to understand why plenty of people go for the more “convenient” option of either nonperishable processed food or ordering takeout more often than is healthy. People have free will, yes, but that doesn’t mean their decisions aren’t influenced by external factors. 

And consequently, it’s not hard to see why the United States has a higher obesity rate than its peer nations. It’s just like my recent essay about loneliness: There are plenty of fat people in Europe, just as there are plenty of lonely people there. But exclusionary zoning is a systemic factor exacerbating this issue that just isn’t present in Europe, at least not nearly to the same degree. 

Thank you for reading. I can’t say I really know how to end this article, but I would really appreciate any and all comments. Take care.