Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store. Week by week, I'm showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what's safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn't come for.
As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:
- dairy-free
- low sugar
- avoid ultraprocessed junk
- avoid food coloring
- conditional vegetarianism
- avoid high histamine foods
- awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options
Last week we found the juice aisle was full of sugar water and lies. This week we'll explore the more honest but definitely still sugar water variety: pop. Or soda, or Coke, depending on where you hail from. The exact terminology is a whole debate, but because I live in the Midwest, it'll be pop in this post.
I'll just state this once. Sugar water is bad for autistic people. It's bad for humans in general, but the artificial colors and sweeteners found in pop are particularly detrimental to people with shaky biologies. When nutrition doctors talk about quick-and-dirty measures to improve your health, they'll often start with having you stop drinking pop. The stuff is literally that irredeemable.
As you can see from just the cursory picture of the aisle here, the US has a love affair with carbonated, flavored sugar water.
Remember how we couldn't get away from snacks in previous aisles? Yeah, there's no escape here either. I'm not even talking 8 ounce aluminum cans. Coke has apparently decided that portioning is Serious Business, so they're selling 2.3 ounce containers. "Sip-sized." I guess that's a positive development? It's all going to be unhealthy but if you can handle just having a tiny serving, that's an improvement.
...This is the US, though, so I have doubts it'll catch on. Coke tries many things to keep at the top of the food chain in the sugar-water department. This will likely join the many failures that policy accrues. Coke itself, though, will likely stay at the top, because it tries these things and uses what works.
Please note, too, that this entire picture is Coke products. Mostly Coke itself, in at least five different packages: 2 liter bottles, 8 ounce aluminum cans, 12ish ounce plastic bottles, those 2.3 ounce "sip" size things, and glass bottles somewhere between the cans and the plastic bottles. When I say people in the US are spoiled for choices, this is one of a dozen things I can easily point to.
Dr. Pepper is another large drink corporation. I have no particular fondness for any pop at this point. I used to drink it occasionally when I was younger, but I always hated the carbonation. The way it made my mouth feel was upsetting.
Past the Dr. Pepper is the "not a major brand" brands of pop. Mostly dominated by Zevia. We'll come back to that brand later. You can also find various "craft" cream sodas and root beers here. My spouse and I spent a decent amount of time looking for a cream soda we liked, and ended up only finding one of the 6-7 options. Cream soda is maybe the only pop I'll bother with at this point, and even then, I mostly just steal sips from him.
Coffee drinks?! What are you doing in here? I guess because of what comes right after it: the energy drinks. For people that are either too young or too callous of their own health to care about what these do to you. I think I've consumed a couple energy drinks in my life, and regretted it each time. They're everything that's wrong with pop, plus shaking your system while screaming, "WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP!"
Various iterations of lemon-lime and other non-cola pop.
And of course, Coca Cola's biggest competitor, Pepsi.
So apparently there are more gaps between aisles than I thought, they just happen in aisles I don't frequent. Here we see the gap between the pop aisle and the booze section. Likely because mixed drinks are a thing.
Faygo is a Detroit-based company, fyi. It's a little surprising to me that they're this far down the aisle. On doing my homework, they're owned by Dr. Pepper, though, which is definitely a far third in the race for #1 pop company.
And then there's more water. Sometimes the sectioning in this store makes perfect sense to me, and sometimes it just makes me scratch my head. Anyway, we have more environmentally-irresponsible plastic bottles here, followed by gallon jugs of three kinds of water: distilled, "spring," and "purified." I'm told distilled water tastes horrible, and I have no idea why. Spring water often isn't actually from a spring, and purified water is definitely purified but to what extent and how is typically unknown.
I have a couple gallons of the last type in the basement just in case of emergency. It wasn't too expensive, and it only takes three days to die of water deprivation.
On the other side we have even more environmentally-unfriendly bottled water. Remember from last time that the PH of bottled water varies markedly, too. Do your homework.
Before we ditch this aisle of poisonous sugar water, let's look at some calorie counts. 12 ounce serving nets you 150 calories and a whopping 41 grams of sugar from high fructose corn syrup. Yikes.
Coke is only marginally better, at 140 calories and 39 grams of sugar. I'd almost bet that's on purpose, actually...
What about the zero sugar option? Seems fine nutritionally, but what's the sweetener? Aspartame. Nope. Big nope. Remember, monk fruit, sugar alcohols like erythritol, and stevia are your best non-sugar options. Artificial sweeteners like sucralose and aspartame are bad news for sensitive guts like mine.
Aspartame...
And stopping back here, to look at the only semi-redeemable thing in the entire aisle. Zevia is so named because it's sweetened with stevia leaf extract. It is also not colored, which makes it even safer to drink. I still don't like the carbonation.
If you decide to try Zevia, please keep in mind that different sweeteners have different tastes and aftertastes. Just like swapping to diet pop, it tastes slightly different and also has a different aftertaste. On the bright side, this stuff won't rot your teeth. Also there's 12 different flavors, so you won't run out of variety anytime soon.
Here's the catch, though. It also will not feed your sugar addiction. Yes, addiction. Remember how sugar bombs are everywhere in this store, even in supposedly healthy things like granola bars and yogurt? Sugar, like drugs, is an addictive substance, and you can become used to and dependant on consuming high amounts of it.
This isn't really noticable in a normal US life, because as I've shown us, the grocery store is very happy to feed you piles of sugar. However, when you do something like swap to sugar-free things, you may find yourself having sugar cravings and withdrawal symptoms.
Personally? I became confused as I drank these sweet beverages but didn't feel satisfied by doing so. That's the sugar addiction not being met.
I am not much of an alcohol afficianado, so this is going to be a relatively quick tour. The alcohol section actually comprises three aisles, not one. As you can see, it's not arranged in an aisle fashion so much as an interconnected series of themed sections. There is still order to the chaos, though, as we'll see.
While it's a state- and society-approved drug, never forget that alcohol is a drug, and you're effectively poisoning your brain when you consume it. It can have interesting effects on autistic people, even making us feel almost "normal" after a certain amount. But of course, the first thing alcohol affects is your judgement. I've read stories of autistic people adopting the bar-hopping way of life because that was the only way they could experience human connection. Suffice it to say these stories typically did not end well.
This first and largest area is devoted to wine. All kinds of wine. Including, as you can see, refrigerated options for people that didn't have time to plan ahead. I didn't realize canned wine was a thing, but here it is in many varieties. Bottle or can form, chilled for your convenience. These are all sugar bombs, even the typical bottles of wine, by the way. Wine is fermented with sugar, and then often sweetened with more sugar to be palatable.
Single-serve bottles and juice-box style containers. Dear me. Continuing down the aisle finds us the sparkling stuff. As I mentioned before, I'm not fond of carbonation. It's okay if it's relatively gentle, but pop typically isn't, and neither are some of these options here.
Just to the left of all this are specific sections for each type of wine. This was the Cabernet Sauvignon section. My father could probably rattle off what each type of wine is like, but apparently in lieu of a guide, the store decor itself will try to help you.
The Merlot, Zinfandel, and Malbec sections. There were several more aisles just like this, but you get the idea. Note the "10% off any 4 wine bottles" deal. A boon to alcoholics everywhere.
Was 10% off not enough? Here's the really inexpensive bottles, and some free advice for serving sizes.
Quantity in a glass bottle insufficient for drinking yourself under a table? Here's the big box wines. Presumably the quality isn't great, but for that price, it's never been so economical to be a socially-appropriate alcoholic.
I may have an opinion about all this, can you tell?
After we pass the wine, we get the only alcohol I gave two figs for when I was 21: the hard stuff. Rum, vodka, tequila, gin, and cognac, among others. When I turned 21 I decided I was going to find out my tolerance to alcohol, its effects on me, and how wary I should be of it. I skipped right past wine because no alcohol tastes good to me, so why bother with the gentle stuff when I could just drink something significantly more effective in smaller quantities?
I learned a few things. First, that I could increase my tolerance and ability to recognize how inebriated I was with practice. Second, that my personality doesn't particularly change when I'm drunk, I simply have reduced judgement and capabilities. And third, that hangovers are as godawful as they're written about in books (and 100% optional if you're smart about things).
After I answered those questions for myself, I stopped drinking as much, and then at all save in social company or on rare occasions. At this point, I think I have a sugary alcoholic beverage maybe once every 2-3 months. My tolerance has reduced itself accordingly, and it now takes very little alcohol now to make me tipsy.
I also have the uncanny ability to recognize when something is alcoholic, right down to tasting a teensy amount of it in a dessert I had at a restaurant once. That was only relevant because one of the other diners was avoiding alcohol like the plague, so she had to set aside her dessert because of it. Alcohol and some other drugs give me the sensation that something is burning, painlessly, in my stomach. It's kind of a useless superpower, but it's mine.
If you looked carefully in the hard liquor picture, you could spot this display tablet. It has moving pictures and makes sounds. You can use it to look up recipes...
Including ones significantly harder to puzzle out than this one, natch.
You could also use it to look up specific boozes and get... well, someone's opinion on how they taste, I guess. Taste buds and experiences vary quite a bit, actually. What you taste when you drink something, and what a professional wine taster (or rum taster, I guess) tastes, are likely to be very very different.
I presume these screens serve two purposes. First, they're advertising. I didn't watch them for very long, but they were peppered throughout the section to tell you about specific brands and do cool animations that make alcohol look enticing.
Second, they save the store a great deal of staffing cost by simply automating the answers to, "how do I make cocktail X?" "What does alcohol Y taste like?" and "What booze should I buy?"
Just like there were sections for wine, there were also sections for whiskey based on geographic location. This was the US section, but there was also a section for Ireland and several other countries that I guess specialize in making it. Presumably whiskey is the alcohol of choice for toxic masculinity in this area, or something. I can't imagine why it would have so much shelf space otherwise.
Yeah, you knew we'd get there eventually. Now entering the Other Sugar Bombs and beer section.
Hard ciders and sodas are sugar bombs with booze. Of all the booze in the store, I pretty much only drink hard cider at this point. I found one particular European important brand with some neat flavor combinations, bought of a ton of it, and proceded to not give a crap ever since.
The big brands of beer, I guess? I'm not going to lie, I barely know any of these.
Craft beer has caught on in much of the US in the last 5 years or so. I don't entirely hate the trend since it can spark interest in supporting local brands. However, in some cases people literally just pour brand name beer into fancy cans, seal them up, then charge a premium for it.
A little bit of extra horror for the recovering alcoholic: more adult juice boxes. I've seen these positioned everywhere in the store, from the impulse buys on the way in, to sitting in the middle of the fruits and vegetables, mocking your desire to leave without buying anything unhealthy.
As a final note, these two sections, the pop and the booze, sit next to the snacks sections, which are themselves behind the various cooking staples. The other side, which we'll get to next time, is the frozen foods. So basically a complete shopping trip will always have you going past the ultra-processed snacks, sugar waters, and double-poisons sections.
I always assumed there was a method behind my grocery store's organization, but only now am I seeing how truly manipulative and abusive it is. And you get to see it with me. Sorry/You're welcome.
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