Everything new in the supermarket is not so good

Realising this, shoppers are shunning processed, packaged products

“We’ve come in the back door,” the writer Michael Ruhlman said as we entered the chill of the ShopRite supermarket here. “We should be over there, in produce.”

Apologising to shoppers trying to steer carts toward the exit we had just entered, we made our way to the produce section, where the first thing that caught our attention was the floor. While the middle of the store was carpeted in a grayish linoleum, here was a warm-coloured fake wood: our initial clue that fruit and vegetables carried a special cachet.

“They have a surprising amount of interesting things here,” Ruhlman said as