“Speaking of Tomatoes”: Supermarkets, the Senses, and Sexual Fantasy in Modern America

This essay analyzes the efforts of supermarket companies, between the late 1930s and early 19650s, to create a multilayered sensory aesthetic for their stores. Grocery retailers sought to excite suburban shoppers’ five senses to exploit what they saw as a feminine longing for erotic excitement intensified by lives circumscribed by postwar domestic norms of “sexual containment.” The sensorial approach to supermarketing revolved around the suggestion that middle-class women could use grocery shopping to help fill the erotic and sexual voids of their lives. In so doing, supermarket companies reinforced the notion that middle-class women should look to the excitements of the homemaker role itself – in this case, family shopper – and not to challenges to existing gender arrangements for contentment.