Quick guide to severe health at... Trader Joe's — and some thoughts on grocery discourse

Avoiding the "green halo"

Normal snack for a normal person

Groceries are important. Probably more important than anything else. I saw a tweet the other day about how Trader Joe’s is the worst store there is in America… overstatement, but an agreed-upon premise in the dark nutrition world… and an extreme idea that’ll be adopted by less obsessed people a year down the line.

Really?

Right now though the TJ’s smack talk is just advanced noise meant to destabilize our understanding of food. Counterintuitive overstatements like this come standard in far reaches of online dark nutrition, and are meant to shock and kneecap well-thought-of places that we know and revere. People love Trader Joe’s. It inspires “brand loyalty” among Americans… it is “beloved,” per even critical press mentions. Trader Joe’s plain mini tote bags are collectible items? (This week.) Branding aside, the food in the store tends to be pretty cheap or pretty good. Sometimes both. It is healthy, according to licensed dietitians. So now online freaks are saying it’s bad…? Really?

TJ’s… and the green halo

What exactly is unhealthy about this store? In one sense, the packaged groceries are not unlike what they have at other stores—the perimeter argument. Indeed, it’s more, for the DN folks, about the branding. From a “brand perspective” TJ’s is health-coded: it has produce and olive oil and fruits and vegetables and a flotilla of alternative milks. It sells like, tweaked snacks with Sriracha, and dark chocolate coffee bites, many different stuffed pretzels. Nice bourgeois snacks… no single snack has a bigger “brand” than the store… and that brand, as assessed by the DN people, is stuff that the managerial class* digs and thinks is healthy, like oats, broccoli, not too much steak, heart healthy foods in wrappers. Vegetarian-adjacent… convenient groceries with a green halo effect.

*I should mention another critique of TJ’s: it’s not accessible for low-income consumers—prob./def. true. It’s cheap for New York but not for people without money. Prob. a bigger issue than “food quality,” honestly—there are food deserts all over America. That health can be “solved” with red meat, rice, apples, bananas, coffee (cheap shit)… is cold comfort.

Buy my Snake Super Health shirt

But it’s not super healthy, which is what the dark nutrition freaks are arguing. Despite the green halo here, and the produce on the shelves, TJ’s draws in their customers through demon sauced-up packaged chemically-made foods full of processed ingredients, vegetable oils and the like. Point being—it’s worse than perimeter groceries from a cheap place, even though branded as healthy. Specifically because it’s processed, isn’t bioavailable (for nutrients and protein) compared to single-ingredient, nutrient dense foods, is rough on GI tract (oils/emulsifiers)… and therefore gut health, low on protein (or bioavailable protein).

Zero Sum and bobo health

It’s a bum-out point… it’s no fun. It’s strict because groceries are zero sum. As in we can only eat (and spend) so much on food, so these items, branding aside, make the store “bad”… and, worse, the halo effect around the “unhealthy” food there prevents people from achieving “real health.” It’s not that frozen/processed stuff at TJ’s… is identical to McDonald’s, but it is closer to it than it is far. But while people who eat McDonald’s know they’re not eating healthy—customers who buy the Trader Joe’s demon 13-ingredient meatballs or spinach pockets are being fooled, the DN people say, into a false sense of health. That’s the argument.

Ultimately this DN approach to the packaged stuff there is decently correct, though brutal and non-empathetic.

Some DN ppl don’t believe in red Coke

Which is not a conflict for me—why get offended by some poster? Instead the downside is that these arguments have too much of a philosophy about groceries. They’re too rigid a way of thinking about food, and are designed to push normal consumers (or folks who are new to this) into the edges. Into not just shopping the perimeter but avoiding all stores unless they are like, mission-based… ditching stores that are just stores (Key Food, etc), and instead kettling customers into just buying stuff from a farm.

Actually… TJ’s is swag…

And while the edge is good—the perimeter of the store itself, and buying groceries exclusively from a farm (a god tier use of one’s money, period)—well, we don’t all live on it. This chatter, for new folks, is all perfect, and enemy of the good. But that’s kind of fine—it’s just people posting. The real issue with this rigidity is in its practice. What I mean is it’s too strict. Health is everywhere, even in whatever places. There are ways to be decently or, more correctly, deeply, deeply healthy by living straight up the middle and by buying groceries not from farms or crazy-ass powdered wig grocery store but somewhere normal that’s everywhere, like Trader Joe’s*.

*Not paid here by TJ’s or doing marketing for them: instead TJ’s here is just a stand-in for like, a normal, mid-level grocery store.

What to buy

And so in the meantime, in this free for all, until there’s a Neil Sheehan-level work and Euro-style regulation that changes the food system, health lies in habits and choices. And what’s cool is that despite narrative or causes, TJ’s very quietly and invisibly gets it done, has stuff that smokes the vague “edge of the grocery store” definition of health, that gets you Balkan/Goop/monk/Hawaii-level healthy. Nutrients, vitamins, density, ease of digestion, levitation… There’s a grocery list here, when timed right, that makes you not have to really hit a farm. It’s where I get most of my stuff. Here’s what I do and get when I’m there: