To the untrained eye, the sprawling mass of Los Angeles is merely a tangle of buildings and traffic, a series of grids smushed up against one another, bifurcated by freeways. But as the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires laid painfully bare (and this is something that those of us who live here know), LA is a city made up of communities, of neighborhoods, two of which were destroyed in recent weeks.
Vanessa Anderson goes by The Grocery Goblin on TikTok. On her feed, she invites us to explore various communities through the lens of the grocery store. Beyond the products on the shelves, the videos are about the people who live and shop in these neighborhoods.
Evan Kleiman: I'm so happy to be talking to you. I remember when you first appeared on my For You page, I was just so smitten with the way you do your explorations. Tell me, are you from the LA area?
Vanessa Andrews: Well, thank you so much. First, I'm honored that I popped up on your For You page. I'm glad the algorithm is working appropriately. I'm not from the LA area. I actually moved here two years ago. Today is my two-year anniversary in LA. I'm from upstate New York, originally, Ithaca, but when I moved to LA, I had never had a car before, and the mobility and the independence that came with having a car was really exciting for me. In that way, I kind of used traveling to all of these different grocery stores all over the city in my new car as a way of orienting myself within the community and getting to know the place.
I'm just curious about your relationship to grocery stores. Tell us what your favorite grocery store is where you're from and why.
My favorite grocery store from upstate New York has to be Wegmans, and it's where my family shopped when we were growing up. But they also had a really interesting child care program called "W Kids," and it was this service that they offered so that parents could drop their kids off at this playroom. They hired high school babysitters to take care of the kids for an hour or so while the parents shopped. I grew up having the fondest memories of playing in this playroom and meeting people, and they had kind of a mini-grocery store set up in the playroom so you can pretend shop while your parents were real shopping. It's not something that I think any store still has but that's my earliest grocery memory.
Then, as I got a little bit older, I joined my mom through the aisles. I would help her pick out products. I was just always fascinated by the display modalities in the store, the signage, the different kinds of people that would shop at the store. It's the perfect place for people-watching.
Then, as I got a little bit older, I wound up in the culinary industry, and going to the store was just a facet of my day.
I remember when I closed my restaurant, I was like, "Oh, my goodness, I don't have to go to five or six stores this week." You call these stores anthropological treasure troves. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by that?
I consider a grocery store to be kind of like a visitor center of sorts or a museum. I think it's the perfect way to really get to know a street, a neighborhood, a city, a country. I think grocery stores end up holding a mirror to the community in which they are in. You can go into a store and understand a lot about a place based on what products are on the shelves, what part of the world those products come from, whether they're local, whether they're imported, what products aren't on the shelves, also who's working at the store and who's shopping there.
A grocery store is a really excellent example of a third place and because of that, there are a lot of very human features that end up imprinted on the store, one of those being a bulletin board, for example. It's somewhere you can go and find maybe an apartment to rent or a language class or a social gathering or meet up at a concert. These bulletin boards, I've just noticed they don't exist in very many places other than community centers and grocery stores.
Part of the reason I do these videos is kind of an anthropological indexing project where I use the lens of the grocery store to examine a community and teach me things about the community.
And just LA in general. What was the very first store that you profiled? And what were some of the ideas that weren't necessarily totally related to what was on the shelves that you mused upon?
The first story I ended up doing a video on was Epicurus Gourmet. It's kind of a warehouse-style importer of fine culinary delights.
It's the butter library.
They have the mini-butter now, too. I don't know if you've seen this, but they have the Mini Bordier at the moment, which is taking TikTok by storm. But I thought it was an interesting place, and I just thought people would want to know about it. So I made a little video about it. It was pretty short and not very in-depth, and it went kind of LA viral, I guess you could say.
Once I noticed that people were resonating with the term "grocery goblin" and resonating with this idea of perusing the aisles as a pastime or as a way of traveling, I thought to myself, "Maybe I could take this a little bit more seriously, and I don't know, just do a little bit more research and see what comes of it."
I think that's a really good example of the evolution from that store to a video that I made recently in El Cajon, which is a neighborhood near San Diego. In that video, I do a little bit of a flip flop, and I take a look at a religious organization that's down the street from this Iraqi grocery store. Some people call this religious organization a cult. It's called Unarius. They believe in reincarnation and past lives, and they wear amazing costumes and make amazing films, and it's very smack dab in the center of Little Baghdad. So in that video, I really take a look at how these two communities, the Christian Iraqi community and this community of Unarians, exist side by side in Southern California but barely interact.
I've often described what Good Food does to people as looking at humanity through the lens of food, and your lens, the grocery store, has all of that. It just encompasses everything. Do you have stores that you just like to wander in for entertainment purposes, versus stores where you're actually doing a substantial shop?
I think that's a really interesting question because I find that there are a lot of stores that embody this philosophy of being a mercado or a marketplace and offering more than just food shopping. Mercado Gonzales, which is an absolutely epic Mexican market where you can go and you can buy kitchenware and you can buy produce and meat, but you can also have a delicious meal. There's various different prepared food sections and fresh churros and lots of different things like that.
Eataly is one of those. I would also say it's kind of this model of a grocery store also being a Disneyland attraction. Tokyo Central in Gardena is a really great example of that as well. You can go in and pretty much shop for every room in your house, in the store. And also, in that example, Tokyo Central has really beautiful handwritten signage. It's the most user-friendly store on the planet. Pretty much every product has a beautiful sign next to it, explaining where the ingredient comes from, how to use it if you're not familiar with it, beautiful imagery and graphs and pictures. It's just a lot of fun to take people there and show them around.
I hate to use the word "viral" but what has been a video that people have engaged with the most that really made you kind of look at it and go, "Hmm, this is interesting"?
I did a video with my friend Yousef Hilmy, who's the founder of a jazz label called Minaret Records. He's from Irvine, and he took me down to Anaheim's Little Arabia district, and we went to an amazing store there, and it got just a lot of reception. There were a lot of people viewing the video and sharing it and engaging with it. I had two college professors reach out to me and say that they used it to teach some intro level human geography courses, which was just so flattering.
I grew up in a college town, so I think validation from academia personally feels like, "Yes, score." But also it was just really cool to be able to understand the greater impact a Tiktok video can have. And I actually had the opportunity to go and talk to both of these college classes about grocery stores. One of the classes, actually, the students all made their own "Grocery Goblin" video, which was amazing.