1. SILVER & GOLD: Spray Paint Your Food! “Silver pretzels anyone? Or perhaps a golden apple? There’s a new paint spray in town (well in Germany) and it’s totally edible! Called Food Finish, this apparently harmless (and tasteless) edible food varnish spray can make sparkling silver muffins to gold-coated steaks in seconds!”

2. MYSTERIOUS CIRCLES: Up first, Devour by Christopher Jonassen. Can you guess what these are? Look first and of you can’t figure it out the answer is at the bottom of this post.

3. INFLUENCE PEDDLING: How Whole Foods “Primes” You To Shop:

Have you ever been primed? I mean has anyone ever deliberately influenced your subconscious mind and altered your perception of reality without your knowing it? Whole Foods Market, and others, are doing it to you right now.

4. BAR CODING: A History of the Supermarket Barcode:

Thirty-seven years ago… a strange new computer technology entered the supermarket. On June 26, 1974, a white male by the name of Clyde Dawson entered Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. He loaded up his cart with groceries and approached the checkout line. The cashier that day was Sharon Buchanan. At 8:01 a.m., she picked a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum out of his cart and scanned it. The gum has now been immortalized at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. That first scan signified a radical transformation of the supermarket, ushering in the era of the Universal Product Code (U.P.C.)—the nondescript, monochrome rectangle that adorns nearly every retail item we purchase. Today, it’s become a standard for consumer products in the electronic age.

5. UMBRELLAS!! “My new hobby is making creepy shopping lists and dropping them in random peoples’ baskets at Costco.” (Not me, btw.)

6. FOOD SUBSIDIES: A couple informative articles about food subsidies: A. The Inconvenient Truth About Cheap Food and Obesity (It’s Not Farm Subsidies) And B. Surprise! Subsidizing Healthy Food Helps Kids Lose Weight.

7. FEATS OF DARING: Returning Shopping Carts Like a Boss

8. QUITE OLD FOOD: Best Before: A man documents his 90-year-old grandmother’s pantry.

9. MAGNETIC LISTS: Shopping list magnets:

…magnets by Harrington and Squires allow a refrigerator to become one big grocery list while adding pops of colour to your kitchen. A fantastic London letterpress workshop, Harrington and Squires have recently added a set of Spice Magnets to their collection.

9. SELF-CHECKOUTS: Many groceries are rethinking self-checkout lanes:

Ten years after self-checkout lanes debuted in many American supermarkets, some chains are beginning to rethink the option. Beginning this month, Albertsons LLC is removing the self-checkout lanes in all of its 217 stores in seven states. As it remodels stores, Kroger has decided to consider the metro or Euro style of checkout lanes, with one customer line for multiple staffed express lanes vs. self-checkouts.

10. YUMMY DISHES: This recipe aggregator site is great: Check out Punchfork.

11. TASTY INFOVIZ: Finally… taste buds and complementary flavors (a visualization).

Couldn’t figure out what those moonlike circles were in #2? They’re frying pans.

So, now to the really important stuff…

1. This person made a chair out of a shopping cart.
2. Photos of Vintage Supermarkets, Grocery & Convenience Stores on Flickr.
3. Speaking of grocery stores, here are 6 subtle ways you’re getting screwed at the grocery store from the ever-fabulous Cracked.
4. And finally, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but what a horrible idea: Candwich Debuts: Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich In A Can.

Finally, we’ve added 600 new scans of found lists so now we’re only several thousand behind (although 2,900 are posted here). Links are in the right column.

Each of these songs was written and performed by a complete stranger via fiverr.com, a web site where people offer to do things for $5. I took a bunch of them up on it.

I sent each of these fine folks a found grocery list (the list songs) or a link to the story I wrote at milkeggsvodka.com (the MEV songs) and asked them to interpret in their own way. It worked out pretty good — thanks to everyone who played along.

FWIW, I made about 20 requests and a little more than half delivered (you get your money credited back to your account when a transaction is cancelled). The ones who didn’t deliver came up with all kinds of serious excuses: I got the flu, I just moved, my camcorder died, my computer died, my friend died, etc. One person was good/blunt enough to simply say, “I don’t have time to do this.”

Anyway, grocerylists.org is proud to present the new musical masterpiece CD “Let’s All Go to the Grocery Store!”:

1. Cheerdealer: “The Official Milk Eggs Vodka Jingle” (the book)
2. Brodafin” “Spaghetti (List #449)”
3. IdiosyncraticAl: “Candy & Gin (List #1096)”
4. Israel279: “At the Grocery Store (MEV #1)”
5. Michiel: “Cupcakes (List #701)”
6. MD2020: “Times Is Tight (MEV #2)”
7. sam_ovp: “My First Shopping at Grocery Shop (List #382)”
8. Jeiji: “No Treats for Bad Dog (List #1648)”
9. Pablo Woodruffe: “Make Our Lists Forever (MEV #3)”
10. Taryn Parker: “Underwear and a Lemon (List #126)”
11. Stocking: “Hatchet & Sheath (List #407)”
12. Casey Smalley: “Everything is Gonna be OK (List #270)”

And it’s free! Here are a couple samples…

• Jeiji: “No Treats for Bad Dog (List #1648)”
• Casey Smalley: “Everything is Gonna be OK (List #270)”

If you’re wondering about the lyrics to the bizarrely entrancing track #7, here they are: My_first_shopping_at_Grocery_Shop.doc. ESL extravaganza! I do appreciate his effort and hope he put that $5 to good use.

You can find the actual lists linked above, if you want to know the specific inspirations for each track.

You can download the MP3s here. Get the cover art here. Released under a Creative Commons license.

PS: Look for my book MILK EGGS VODKA (the jingle song) to be re-released in paperback in April 2011.

UPDATE: The paperback is now available and here’s a video to celebrate.

The event is sponsored by He Said/She Said, an exhibition and event series held in the home of Pamela Fraser and Randall Szott. They take turns presenting what amounts to an ongoing conversation about art and culture — Ms. Fraser presenting art and artists, and Mr. Szott sharing the activities of people who work in other contexts (that’s me :-). Together they hope to offer up a fun and thoughtful take on current ideas in art and life.

All the info you need is here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1327562/

Hope to see you there!

-bk

Update: The scene, as it was. Thanks, Randal & Pamela!

Though I must confess that I think they put their skills to great use — and I would love to find a list like this one day.

So there used to be, like, no fun or interesting books about grocery stores and grocery store… stuff. Then Julian Montague released his amazing and comprehensive “The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” in 2006. A marvelous achievement! Have you seen it?

And in 2007 I submitted my own opus, “Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found,” a compilation of abandoned grocery lists discovered in grocery carts, market floors, and parking lots across the country.

And now here we are in 2008. What’s left? Oh, plenty, trust me. Hillary Carlip also collects other people’s discarded shopping lists. And she’s been doing it longer than I have. She recently put out a wonderful book called “A la Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers,” in which she imagines and assumes (quite literally and astoundingly!) the identity of the shoppers behind her found lists and writes some backstory about them. I love it. You will too. More: alacartthebook.com

The photos (over 5,000 of them!) showed him that most of it was food packaging. He says, That daily coffee cup adds up.

Did it change him? You bet…”