If you teleported me to a foreign city for a day and gave me a choice between a trip to the supermarket or a museum, I’d almost always choose the supermarket. This is not (just) because I like snacks more than I like still lifes, it’s because a grocery store is a museum in its own right: a little slice of local life. And I am not the only person to brand “buying crisps” a cultural experience: “grocery store tourism” is having a moment on social media. Influencers are treating trips to the supermarket with the same reverence they might reserve for the Louvre.
This isn’t just greed in intellectual packaging. There are dissertations to be written on why you can find prawn cocktail crisps on British supermarket shelves and nowhere else. There are deep historical reasons why Germany is so obsessed with paprika-flavoured snacks.
