Quotulatiousness

July 3, 2026

The latest trend in tourism: “grocery tourism”

Filed under: Australia, Food, Japan, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Freeman, Nicole James discusses being so far ahead of a trend that it’s only just catching up with her now:

“Piggly Wiggly” by afiler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Grocery tourism is the hot trend of 2026 according to Condé Nast Traveler. This is all well and good, but also a bit late to the trolley because I have been practicing this trend since my twenties, although without the benefit of a name or a hashtag.

My two worlds met in the supermarket aisle. Before I was a travel writer and sent to places with hotel beds that appeared to have been prepared for minor royalty or a very clean corpse, I was a checkout chick at supermarket chain Coles. This was when prices were typed in by hand, making me feel like I was conducting a low-level NASA launch procedure.

A tin of pineapple rings would trundle towards me, and I would punch in its code. Behind it would come shampoo, fish fingers, instant pudding, 24 cans of Diet Coke, and a packet of aspirin. From these items, I could deduce entire family systems. Marriage trouble. School excursions. Flu. A birthday party. A woman about to murder everyone in her house unless she got a Mint Slice into herself immediately.

I loved the products. Not necessarily the customers who could turn feral over a five-cent discrepancy in canned tomatoes. The conveyor belt was a pageant of human need. It was anthropology in a polyester apron.

When people now declare that they have discovered grocery store tourism, I feel like saying, “We know. We’ve had those for years.”

My first trip to America should have been my grand supermarket awakening. I was a PR manager for Malaysia Airlines in the late ’90s, and we were launching a very long flight to New York from Sydney via KL and Dubai. I arrived bristling with ambition. I wanted to see the cereal aisle. Long had we heard rumors of American supermarkets. They were great glittering cathedrals of corn syrup with aisles devoted just to cereal and marshmallows in the shapes of everything from the moon and stars to presidents. I wanted to stand before them all in awe, like Moses, if Moses had come down from the mountain carrying Pop-Tarts.

[…]

I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.

Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.

And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.

Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.

South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.

And now, social media has turned all of this into content. Travelers narrate the experience into their phones. A German soccer fan can wander into an American Waffle House at one in the morning and emerge as a folk hero. Erewhon in Los Angeles has become a celebrity shrine where a smoothie can cost more than a small household appliance and one strawberry comes packaged like an engagement ring and with a similar price.

Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.

Was this workbench a huge mistake?

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 1 Jul 2026

Get the plans!
The Big Nick: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/p/big-nick-bench
The English Joiner’s Bench: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/p/joiners-bench-bundle-everything-about-the-bench
The Minimum Timber Bench: https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/p/minimum-timber-bench
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1977 – when the French intelligentsia rallied to protect pedophiles

Filed under: France, Health, History, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam poinpoints the formal attempt to turn criminal pedophilia into academically supported individuals with “Minor Attraction” (translated from the original French by X):

In 1977, a petition appeared in Le Monde and Libération. It called for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and children aged thirteen. Look at the signatures. Foucault. Derrida. Sartre. Beauvoir. Barthes. Deleuze. Guattari. Lyotard. Sollers. The entirety of the French intellectual aristocracy, the very same that would go on to colonize Yale and Berkeley, gathered under a text that pedantically explains that the child is capable of consenting.

This is not an anecdote. It is the proof.

A few days ago, I wrote that French Theory rested on a single thesis: there is no truth, there are only relations of power. I was told I was caricaturing, that these men were too subtle to be reduced to a slogan. Very well. Then let us observe what subtlety produces when pushed to its extreme.

If every norm is merely domination in disguise, then the prohibition protecting childhood is a form of domination like any other. If every truth is a construction, then innocence is a construction. If every desire is worth every other because no law is legitimate, then there is no longer any reason to defend the most elementary boundary that a civilization has ever established. They did not sign this petition despite their philosophy. They signed it because of it. It was the logical conclusion of the system. They simply had the imprudence to write it down in black and white, before their American heirs learned to wrap the same logic in more cautious vocabulary.

This is the man still taught in undergraduate courses. This is the thinker still cited with reverence at conferences. The one who, in 1977, thought the law protected children a little too much.

A thought is judged by what it makes possible. A thought that, when it reaches its term, no longer knows how to say why one does not touch children is not a subtle thought. It is a dead thought. And a civilization that continues to teach it with deference is not subtle either. It is complicit.

One does not deconstruct innocence. One protects it. It is even more or less the only thing one has no right to fail at.

Beef Bourguignon for the French Peasants from 1885

Filed under: Food, France, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Jan 2026

Stewed beef in red wine sauce with onions

City/Region: France
Time Period: 1885

Originally a peasant dish, early beef bourguignon was a sauce for leftover stewed beef. Elevated and popularized by the father of French haute cuisine, Auguste Escoffier, it shortly thereafter made the transition from a sauce to stew, and beef bourguignon was further popularized by cooking icon Julia Child.

This recipe from 1885 is for the sauce version, and it is just as delicious as the modern stew. It’s a little more wine-forward and a little less sweet, the meat is fall-apart tender, and the onions are my favorite part. If you have some leftover cooked beef like a roast or short ribs, this sauce is a great way to jazz it up. Otherwise, make the stewed beef as instructed in the recipe below because the sauce is absolutely worth it.

    Boeuf Bourguignonne
    Brown a piece of pork belly, diced, in butter; add a little flour, salt, and pepper, and add a mixture of half broth and half red wine; add a few small white onions, well peeled; let cook for 20 minutes, then add to this sauce your stewed beef, cut into slices. When the meat is well heated through, serve with the sauce.
    — La Bonne Cuisine Pour Tous ou l’Art de Bien Vivre a Bon Marché by Marcel Butler, 1885

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QotD: Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University, where he was inspired in the classroom by Charles Beard, America’s foremost progressive historian — and a man sympathetic to socialism. “Beard was nothing less than a spellbinder”, Josephson recalled, and Beard’s lectures helped guide him on a path to radical politics.

During the 1920s, after graduation, Josephson became a journalist, an expatriate to France, and, after his return, a part of New York’s literary elite. He and Beard reconnected in 1930, and the mentor urged his student to write a book denouncing the men who had launched America’s industrial power. “Oh! those respectable ones”, Beard said of America’s capitalists, “oh! their temples of respectability — how I detest them, how I would love to pull them all down!” Happily for Beard, Josephson was handy to do the job for him. Josephson dedicated The Robber Barons to Beard, the historian most responsible for the book’s contents.

Josephson began research for his book in 1932, the nadir of the Great Depression. Businessmen were a handy scapegoat for that crisis, and Josephson embraced a Marxist view that the Great Depression was perhaps the last phase in the fall of capitalism and the triumph of communism. In a written interview for Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, Josephson said he enjoyed watching “the breakdown of our cult of business success and optimism”. He added, “The freedom of the U.S.S.R. from our cycles of insanity is the strongest argument in the world for the reconstruction of our society in a new form that is as highly centralized as Russia’s …”

Though not a member of the Communist Party, Josephson co-authored an open letter of support for the Communist Party candidates for President of the United States in 1932. “We believe”, the letter said, “that the only effective way to protest against the chaos, the appalling wastefulness, and the indescribable misery inherent in the present economic system is to vote for the Communist candidates”.

Josephson traced the troubled capitalist system of the 1930s back to the entrepreneurs of the late 1800s. Thus, by explaining what he thought was the wasteful, greedy, and corrupt development of steel, oil, and other industries under capitalism, Josephson was explaining to readers why the Great Depression was occurring. “I am not a complete Marxist”, Josephson insisted, “But what I took to heart for my own project was his theory of the process of industrial concentration, in Vol. 1 of [Marx’s] Capital, which underlay my book”.

Josephson never intended to write an objective view of American economic life in the Gilded Age. He did little research and mainly used secondary sources that supported his Marxist viewpoint. As he had written in the New Republic, “Far from shunning propaganda, we must use it more nobly, more skillfully than our predecessors, and speak through it in the local language and slogans.” Thus he wrote The Robber Barons with dramatic stories, anecdotes, and innuendos that demeaned corporate America and made the case for massive government intervention.

Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.

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