Annemarie Lopez visits her local supermarket and reflects on unheroic everyday walking.

Early in Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye, Elliott Gould’s detective Marlowe goes to the supermarket at three in the morning to buy food for his cat. Under humming fluorescent light, he saunters, squinting at shelves stacked with tins, trying to find his cat’s favourite brand. His shirt is rumpled, his face unshaven. He’s failed at everything the city values – success, money, women – but he’s determined to care for this one creature who needs him. In that supermarket, he’s not a detective. He’s a gatherer. A man with a carrier bag.

The anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher argued that the first human tool wasn’t a weapon but a container – a vessel for gathering fruit, seeds, water, the things that keep us alive. Ursula Le Guin took up this idea in her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” championing stories not of the lone man with the stick, the sword, the gun – the linear thrust toward conquest – but stories about gathering, sharing, making space for the slow rhythm of keeping one another alive. The man going out for the mammoth with his spear, Le Guin notes, was relatively rare. But he often came back with good stories, and eventually they became the only stories we told.

But mostly, we survived, not with the occasional mammoth, but by gathering, from forests and fields, filling our woven baskets, bringing them back and sharing the contents. Now we go to the supermarket with our Bags for Life.

I think of this walking to my local supermarket in London, reusable bag under my arm because I care about the planet. An old housemate who worked in a supermarket once told me the products there was called “units” – a word that made me laugh and shudder. The reduction of food, almost sacred in my Italian family, to the abstract cult of data.  

My local supermarket is ugly. The outside is unadorned biscuity brown brick. The plastic signage bright orange. It sits beside an asphalt wasteland where cars jostle for spaces. The automatic doors glide open and I step through. I grab a basket or a trolley depending on my needs and seek out the strange abundance inside: tomatoes from the Isle of Wight, pasta from Italy, coffee from Colombia. Things I need and things I don’t, things that catch my eye – like the first Sicilian blood oranges of the season. I think of what might please the friends coming to dinner: the expensive cheese, the seeded crackers, the chocolate with sea salt. We come not as conquerors but as caretakers, gathering what will sustain us and what will delight us, what we need and what we want to give.

The anthropologist Marc Augé called supermarkets “non-places” – spaces of transit and anonymity, spaces of supermodernity, like airports or hotels. But he was wrong, or perhaps he never went to the supermarket to buy strawberries for his amour. The supermarket becomes a place through use, through our footsteps pushing a trolley, through the small acts of attention and transgression we perform there.

Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, explains how this works: while institutions impose “strategies” – the calculated layouts, the manipulative product placements, the optimized flows designed to maximize consumption – shoppers engage in “tactics,” improvisational acts of resistance and creative reappropriation. We take inefficient routes through the aisles, linger where we’re not meant to linger, ignore the promotional endcaps to hunt for our preferred brand on the bottom shelf. You might call your friend in another country and take them on a tour of the biscuit aisle. A recent series of articles claimed that Gen Z were using the supermarket as a dating venue. Acts of détournement are everywhere as I wander the aisles.

These everyday practices, de Certeau argues, are poetic: they make space meaningful through our physical movement, through repeated use, through the overlay of personal significance. The supermarket becomes your supermarket not through its design but through what you do there, the memories you accumulate, the rhythms you establish. Spaces don’t have inherent meaning imposed downward – we make them meaningful from below, often with our feet.

This is a very different kind of walking than the hero’s journey. My local supermarket is big, but I don’t walk across it to conquer space or accumulate steps. I walk within it, moving through the same aisles, week after week, learning where they’ve moved the tahini, remembering which shelf holds the reduced items. This is circular walking, not linear. The hero’s walk has a destination; the gatherer’s walk is the destination.

Walking artist Clare Qualmann has developed her practice around this kind of unheroic, everyday walking. The daily walk to school gates, the trudge to shops through rain, the push of the pram to the park. These are gestures that rarely make it into maps or memoirs, but they deserve our attention. Not the grand crossings of explorers but the quiet, persistent movements that stitch our lives together. The same route, the same doors that whoosh open, the same squeak of trolley wheels.

To wander the aisles is to explore the geography of necessity and care. We walk slowly as we scan the shelves, checking prices, choosing between budget and desire. The light is unflattering. Somewhere a child is crying. A till beeps its metronomic rhythm. I gently, surreptitiously, press the papayas and avocados with my fingertips, checking they are neither too ripe nor too hard. Even if I were alone, buying only for me, I’d do it with the same care.

The supermarket, for all its capitalist manipulation, and there’s plenty – loyalty cards, two-for-one, special offers – is one of the few public interiors left where everyone gathers. I’ve chatted with strangers who cannot reach higher shelves, stood on tiptoe to hand down tins of chickpeas. I know an older woman who met her gentleman friend in an Aldi tinned tomato section, both reaching for the same tin of San Marzano. After a new relationship has passed its heady phase of takeaways consumed in rumpled sheets, comes the first trip to the supermarket together. The gourmet ice cream is on special. The first cherries of the season gleam purple-black and luscious.

Think of Michael Caine’s agent in The Ipcress File, sashaying down the aisle to buy champignons de Paris, which he will later use to make an omelette for the woman he seduces. Or Jeff Bridges’ Lebowski shuffling to the supermarket fridge in his bathrobe and mules, sniffing the carton of half-and-half for his White Russian – his sweet consolation in a humble life.

We all go there, our quirks and indulgences laid bare. You can read a lot in another person’s basket: lentils, or marbled bacon; oat milk or full-fat; a trolley rattling with cut-price wine. I’ve met people I only know in passing at the supermarket, doctors, lawyers, magistrates, and it brings a sudden, unexpected intimacy as our eyes glance across our respective baskets.  

Le Guin reminds us that the problem with heroic stories is not just their violence but their scale. They make everything else – the small, the cyclical, the sustaining – seem insignificant. But most of human life has been lived in the register of the gatherer, not the warrior. The story of the supermarket is the story of us.

Donna Haraway writes about living well in the tangled aftermath of modernity, in its ruins. The supermarket is one of those ruins: a space built by capitalism but capable, still, of hosting gestures of care. Here we “stay with the trouble”, as she calls it, searching for something to satisfy us within our means, counting our change, maybe placing a few items in the basket for the foodbank. Lebowski writing out a cheque for sixty-seven cents.  

When I was at university, I worked in the grocery section of a large department store. One day a security guard brought me a woman with a pram, baby asleep inside. He showed me a packet of stockings and a packet of nappies. Had she paid? he asked. She hadn’t, but I told him she had. It seemed unthinkable not to. In the middle of excess consumerism were two minimum wage employees confronting each other over a poor woman who wanted a few small things she couldn’t afford: stockings for herself; nappies for her baby. The carrier bag theory isn’t just about gathering – it’s about what we choose to hold, and what we choose to let go. Small rebellions of care in a system designed for profit.

I walk home from the supermarket with my bag full. Plump figs, peppers and aubergines, a packet of tagliatelle and tins of sardines. To walk home with our gathered food is to close a loop between the outside world and the intimate world where we live. When I am writing, the supermarket loop is my daily expedition, returning with groceries, maybe an encounter with one of my neighbours, a snatch of overheard dialogue stolen from strangers that will make a story to tell.

The hero heads home with a weary tread, a stick or a gun in his hand, through a world half-broken by his act of saving. By the end of The Long Goodbye, Marlowe has picked up a gun and gone to Mexico, his friend is dead, he trudges down a dusty road alone. But the gatherer walks home lightly, even with a heavy carrier bag hoisted on their shoulder. Their territory hasn’t expanded, perhaps, but it has been enriched.