grocery shopping, the modern way

The other evening it was raining out, a cold, drizzly, fall rain, and my roommate and I were starting to make dinner together. We had everything we actually needed, but the salad was going to be a little bare so he suggested we run over to Dominion to pick up some more greens and a pepper. I was still wondering where the local 24-hour Dominion supermarket was, for those spur-of-the moment, middle-of-the-night purchases, so I agreed. I grabbed my jacket and tuque to prepare for going outside, thinking how cozy I would be, all bundled up in the rain, and how the Toronto air always smells the freshest during and after a rain. But when he hit the "basement" button in the elevator, I realized he was planning to drive to the store, an idea which hadn't even crossed my mind. I guess I was too surprised to protest too strongly, so the next thing I knew we were making the 5-minute drive to the grocery store. So we never had to step outside at all, except for the few steps between the parking lot into the large, sprawling supermarket. I hardly needed my jacket, much less the tuque. We picked up a bunch of spinach and a green pepper, grown with fossil fuels, then stepped up to an unstaffed checkout line! That's right, you check out your own groceries. Just scan the packaged items, and tell the touch-screen what your produce is before you put it in your grocery bag, which it weighs as you add each item. Dominion has managed to unemploy supermarket tellers, and in a way that requires you to use their disposable grocery bags as opposed to your own reusable bag. We took our well-packaged produce to the car and drove back home, then took the elevator back up to our 24th floor apartment. Amazing, the amount of excess energy one can consume to acquire food. I wish I had an easy way to calculate how much energy that little trip required. The 5-minute drive from a "cold" start emitted about half of what a 30-minute drive would have. I bet that the "incidental" energy consumed by the elevator, the drive, the agronomical inputs to grow the food, and trucking of the food, outweighed the calorie content of the food itself by many thousands to one. Not many things are more ordinary than a trip to the store, but on further examination it sure can seem extraordinary.