It is approaching 7:30 p.m., and my daughter is resting her head on my shoulder at the end of our epic adventure of a day. Niko hums away the last of her frenzied energy, the warmth still radiating off of her as she plays with the ends of my hair. The room smells like the gardenia she tried to eat an hour before, and I close my eyes while creating new rhymes to “Rock-a-bye Baby.” The lyrics only make sense in the context of this moment, a baby bird wrapped in the dimming light, folded calmly against my chest.
While I am cataloging the long list of things to get done in my head, I am also thanking my lucky stars that half of them I can get done in an app, on my phone, or a laptop. I relish in today’s technological advancements and their ability to give me back the presence I need to be here in a sweet moment that comes fewer and fewer these days.
I can connect and meet with my doctor quickly over online platforms, proof my non-dominant hand’s texting flaws before I even see them, archive my life in the cloud, and, one of my favorites, grocery shop digitally.
The new technological norms and expectations that have been established in my life give me back time, expanding a resource always in short supply. Grocery and meal services allow me to concentrate on the things that matter the most. Sometimes those tasks include completing this editor’s letter. Other times, they allow me to draw out a moment like this with my daughter. The bittersweet of it: If it wasn’t for Hurricane Niko Wright, I could easily never move from my office chair or my standup desk.
Between evolving algorithms and my developing preferences, Instacart could curate my grocery list fairly accurately—timing my purchase frequency and suggesting a world of items I both buy regularly and do not need at all, but might love. The double edge to these exciting advancements we have all experienced (much more since Covid found us) is that the experiential gets tucked away nicely into a screen, flattened to just a few senses, a few characterizations.
But therein lies the choice: to shop brick-and-mortar or digital.
If I want a box of Tide or a container of Good Culture Cottage Cheese, please Instacart. If I want Envy™ apples, firm white grapes, rock-hard yellow nectarines, and a cantaloupe that smells like a floral bouquet, I grab my keys, Niko, and my wallet and start the car. This may not always be the case, but fresh preferences are so specific to the shopper making the decisions, and I daresay that the hired shoppers out there do not all have the same elevated standard that I do, nor do they care to inquire or read my mind. Understandably, on the latter.
While branding continues to evolve on shopping platforms, sometimes I still don’t know what farmer or supplier I am going to get dropped off on my not-so-digital doorstep.
So, thank you, digital grocery platform for giving me back the time to pause with my family or go for a run. But, for now, my produce is still hand-picked—well, most of the time—by me.
Cheers to brown bananas and plums that could knock out a rugby player.
