Grocery Store Culture Analysis

Grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay Area hold considerate meaning to cultures found there. The focus of this paper will be particularly on the people within the Indian community found in this area, the grocery stores geared towards Indian culture help to retain, produce and even disavow the people who identify within this culture. They retain their culture through the dishes made with the ingredients, they continue traditional gender roles, and they also incorporate several different non-food aspects of the culture into the stores. Indian culture is produced back into the community through young Indian Americans, through the wide variety and differences within the Indian culture, and other non-Indian Americans wishing to explore a new culture.

Some of the items that the store owners would bring in would be Indian images, cosmetics, and even music (Mankekar, 2002). This emphasizes the importance of the Indian grocery stores not only for the ingredients that help make foods that are familiar and traditional but also to keep other aspects of the culture close at hand like important images like religious ones. Music and cosmetics being brought into the store also helps with the young Indian American children getting familiarized with different aspects of the culture even though they may not have been born there. Store owners said that the shoppers coming into the store are looking for the whole package of their culture not just a place for groceries (Mankekar,

An example of this was discussed in class how just because a group of peoples may have come from a particular geographical location do not necessarily mean they identify as the same with each other. There are several district different groups of people who shop in the store and the store owners are very aware of the different ethnic groups that come into their stores (Mankekar, 2002). This is a way in which Indian culture is disavowed because it forms a separation of the Indian culture, this is not a bad thing but with putting the grocery stores under the same umbrella and outsider looking in would not make the connection that there are different cultures within one overarching one. People of the European American back group can be clearly seen as different from anyone’s point of view. While the people of each individual and different Indian culture can clearly make the differences out within the