Is there a more accessible way to food shop?
Barriers outside and inside supermarkets make picking up groceries a frustrating experience for some with low or no vision
One of the things I like most about my Essex County town is that there are three supermarkets within walking distance from my home. Cooking is important to me and so is being able to pick up groceries without having to bum a ride off someone to bring me to the store. How to get to a supermarket is one thing that a person with a visual disability must consider, but there are an endless number of other dilemmas that one must contend with after passing through those sliding glass doors. Food shopping can be a time consuming and frustrating experience for someone with low or no sight; labels and signage are difficult to read, product placement is random and all these self checkout kiosks are largely inaccessible. Yes, I am aware there is online shopping and delivery, but call me old fashioned- I like to pick out my own fruits and vegetables and frankly, I hate paying those extra fees.
Last year I went on a cross country journey to find a more accessible way to food shop. Along the way, I learned how to use a cane, picked up groceries while blindfolded and let a guy direct me through a supermarket through my smartphone’s camera. And what came out of it all was a 45-minute long story for the podcast Proof by America’s Test Kitchen. This was the most personal story I’ve ever worked on and while I have revealed my disability in a handful of stories I’ve produced before, this tested how deep I wanted to dive into my comfort zone and challenged how much I wanted to disclose about myself. But, the crew at Proof were incredibly supportive and helped me find ways to explain my very subjective experience.
A transcript of the audio story can be found here.
The story would not have been possible without the support of UC Berkeley's 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship. I flew out to the west coast twice in 2022 for workshops at the J-school there and the feedback from the program’s editors and my fellow fellows helped shape my report.
I mentioned that I went food shopping with the help of someone guiding me via my phone’s camera. That was my inaugural test run of the app Aira. While I lumbered around a Wegmans in Parsippany with my phone held at eye level, Lens15’s social media coordinator, Keeley Giblin, filmed this video.
Keeley also did the final edit on this video and recorded the audio description.
Here’s the origin story of my reporting.
My colleague at Montclair State University, Elaine Gerber, has conducted extensive research on how blindness affects food security. I saw a lot of myself in her writing and it was surprising to me. I hadn’t considered how much of my own behavior at the supermarket was affected by my visual impairment. Nor did I ever imagine that it was a topic that warranted analysis. Even though my story for Proof turned out to be a much more personal narrative, Elaine’s work underscored my interest in this issue and influenced my original pitch. So, before I took off for India in January, I convinced her to get on the phone with me for this edition of the newsletter.
Take a look at the condensed and edited transcript of that chat or listen to it by clicking on the audio player below.
Elaine Gerber: What struck me was so much shame around it. Culturally there's so much status wrapped up in being a foodie person or knowing where the latest restaurants are and what's a good place to eat or something like that. That not having access to food is embarrassing. It's shameful. And it's deeply personal and traumatizing for people.
Jason Strother: I've been visually impaired my whole life and I cook a lot. But it wasn't until I read some of your research a few years ago that some of these things started making sense to me, like, oh yeah this is why I have trouble food shopping. Oh, this is my experience food shopping. But I'm interested in why you got interested in this topic of food insecurity and blindness. What led you to doing some research about this?
Elaine Gerber: I'm sighted, I'm fully sighted. But after graduate school I worked at the American Foundation for the Blind. I also had a personal relationship with a blind man for the better part of seven years. And he was a great cook. He is still a great cook, I assume. So this is a personal and a professional interest for me, and I have a lot of friends who are blind and in that world, some of them are also foodies. So it just kind of became apparent really how some people really had access and knowledge and so many people really didn't.
It was very obvious how directly this is impacting people's health and their ability to care for themselves and their bodies. But it also impacts people's independence. If you struggle to get access to food or sufficient groceries, or you don't know how to cook, if you acknowledge that and you admit that, you're kind of saying that you can't be independent.
Jason Strother: Based on your conversations you've had with visually impaired people, what were some of the common barriers they faced while trying to put food on the table?
Elaine Gerber: Number one is cost. And obviously since the pandemic, my research was really pre pandemic, but since the pandemic, I knew cost of food has gone up for everyone. And so for anyone living on a fixed income, which a lot of blind and visually impaired people are stretching your budget, making it go further is really hard. Especially if you wanna eat healthy food. Going to a grocery store, there's two things. There's access to get to the grocery store. And that was still a huge issue because most blind people don't drive. And a lot of people, whether they're blind or visually impaired, don't live near public transit in the United States. So having access to public transit that took them close to a grocery store or that took them to somewhere where there were sidewalks where they could walk to a grocery store was a really big deal.
Then once getting to the market, I think people are really dependent upon what they call shopper's assistants. In some places they just call them customer service agents. But someone from the grocery store will go around and basically do your shopping list for or with you. And people had a really range of experiences with that. Some places like where they were used to doing it and they had good training or they encountered blind people a lot, they were really great. But a lot of people had struggles with these. These are supposed to be the fix, right? This is supposed to be the accommodation, and then the accommodation doesn't work.
Jason Strother: One of the things that stood out to me when I was reading your research was how people with visual impairments often end up just buying the same things again and again. Can you explain why that is?
Elaine Gerber: If you haven't grown up kind of learning to cook with a visual impairment because you maybe got your eyesight changed later in life or you just weren't taught that as a child or whatever. I think people might be less comfortable in the kitchen and doing certain kinds of cooking. So I think having a product that you know is good, that you like and that you know how to prepare gives people some ease, some comfort.
Jason Strother: But I also imagine there's just a limitation of knowing what else is available on the shelves.
Elaine Gerber: That's a really great point. There's been a proliferation of a lot of certain kinds of food that didn't used to exist even 10 years ago, let alone when I was growing up. And so that's a really good point. It's hard to, for people to kind of scan the shelves cause they're not doing that visually. So how do you know what else is out there that you could choose from? I don't know what I wanna make tonight. I go in and I see, oh, these particular produce looks really good. I'm gonna bring that home. Or this particular type of fish looks really fresh, I'm gonna get that instead of what was on my list. So it might be that that's something that's a lot harder to do for blind or visually impaired people, and you would have to have a lot of trust in your customer service agent to tell you what looked good or what else was there.
Jason Strother: It can be a very time consuming process to shop with a shopper's assistant.
Elaine Gerber: Yeah. But people did say to me that when they had good customer service agents they would spend the extra money to go to that store or take the extra time to get to that store because they had better access. But unfortunately, a lot of people in my research reported actually that the accommodation failed.
Jason Strother: What were some of the ways that the people you spoke with for your research dealt with the barriers that limit a blind shopper's experience at the supermarket?
Elaine Gerber: I also ask people about strategies. So people, refer to other humans as an accommodation, if you will. Like, they would say I would bring a friend or a partner or someone with me to go shopping. So that they wouldn't rely necessarily on the shopper's assistant, but they would have someone there with them to help them shop. Other times people mentioned shopping online cause then they didn't need to deal with the stigma or the judgment or the wrong products from the shopper's assistant. If the website was accessible and they had good tech skills, they could just get exactly what they wanted online.
Also people's barriers don't end just when they get their groceries. Getting your groceries and getting home also can be a barrier to people especially if they're on public transit or using paratransit. Once you get home, how do you know, if you bought a bunch of cans, what can, is what or the freezer items that you brought home because they don't smell yet cause they're frozen. So it's really hard for people to kind of stock their kitchens and put things away, label them themselves once they get home, unless they have some other either technology or person there to help them.
Jason Strother: I think that's kind of wrapping up
Elaine Gerber: can I say one more thing?
Jason Strother: Please.
Elaine Gerber: So I don't wanna say that all is bad and all is awful because at the same time, while there are a lot of barriers to grocery shopping and then getting groceries home and learning how to cook at the same time there's some blind people and resources for blind people that are out there like never before.
There's all kinds of descriptive videos now about how to cook, and there was a group that made a cooking show called Cooking Without Looking. I'm not sure if it's still running. And if you're a fan of the more mainstream cooking shows, one of the chefs who won the TV show Master Chef a few years ago, Christine Ha, she's a blind woman. And an excellent cook. So there's sort of foody side of things too that's really available and out there if people are interested in it. So there are more resources I think, than there used to be, and I think that's a really good thing.
Jason Strother: Great speaking with you as always, Elaine.
Elaine Gerber: Bye Jason.
The day after our talk, I received an email from Elaine with a little more detail on her findings. Here is some of that.
“Also, I know I mentioned stigma at the grocery store, but I didn't elaborate. I should have. I had *multiple* VI people tell me that they were accused of shoplifting, kicked out of stores, verbally assaulted, and more. Many had had traumatizing experiences while shopping. Jason, as you well-know, people who have partial sight try to make the most of it, which means they may need to look at something super close up or look at it for longer than sighted people to determine what something actually is. It is normative behavior among blind people, but it is interpreted as "off" by security personnel who are trained to look for 'weird' behavior. I have actual quotes that would blow your mind the way people were treated! And apparently, details didn't seem to matter, it happened to all kinds of blind people - including those who may otherwise be insulated by privilege of race or class. Truthfully, it shocked me. I mean, I shouldn't be shocked by such outright ignorance and ableism, but I was. People were horrible, and that is a huge disincentive to continue shopping there! I'd certainly shop somewhere else, if I had a choice.”
Update from South Asia
I’ve wrapped up my work in eastern India and arrived in Sri Lanka earlier this month. In this segment of my Fulbright project, I’ll focus on how women with a disability face even greater risks during disasters. I’ll be based in Colombo until July.
Keeley Giblin edited this newsletter.