I live in a pretty great location. Three blocks from a small co-op, four blocks from a local convenience store, a half mile from a larger (better) co-op, and a mile from a larger local chain grocer. It’s nice to be so close to a healthy variety of grocery stores, even if I usually opt for People’s (we are members-owners after all). Sure, it’s nice to be apart of a co-op for a variety of reasons, but the primary one for me these days really is that I can walk there.

The walk itself is somewhat uneventful. I walk across the Rhine-Lafayette bridge over the Brooklyn Yard, mosey past the tow shop that always uses the sidewalk for parking space, cross Powell at 21st (while cursing ODOT for closing the west leg of the crosswalk), and then buy my groceries. It’s not really worth writing home about, and my reasons for walking are not to get picture of Western Pacific Heritage locomotives in the local train yard.

Yes, sometimes I do see fun locomotives in the yard – but I see those on my bike too. Going to the store on foot creates a particular rhythm in my life that I think is worth articulating in depth. By going on foot, I am physically constrained in how much food I can reasonably carry. If I buy too much, the walk home becomes an Herculean task, and it’s one that I’ve had to face more times than I’d care to admit. This physical limit means that my grocery runs are usually limited to two days of food.

I think this is great. Does it mean I take 3 to 4 trips to the store per week? Absolutely. This might take an extra hour per week, but as far as I’m concerned it’s time well spent. It allows for a degree of flexibility that the week plus grocery hauls simply can’t dream of. It means I basically always have fresh fruit and other produce in the house. And it also gets me out of the house, something that can be vitally important on days where the sky is grey and the mood is blue. Not to mention how much easier it is to just drop down to the store if you need to get just a few things that you forgot!

Evidently, much of this is underpinned by my own personal love for cooking. Being flexible is a huge aspect to this, as the daily offerings at the store are always changing. Letting the deals dictate what I cook means I get to be more creative in the kitchen, and saves some money to boot. I realize that this isn’t a model that everyone cooks by, and some prefer to be shackled to recipes requiring a very specific set of ingredients you probably will only use once. Do I think this is silly? Of course I do, but this is a walking blog not a cooking blog.

If it were a cooking blog, I would go into an even longer tirade about how meaningful and wonderful it is to be able to cook a meal from scratch without needing to be guided by anything more than the spirit of a recipe. And how the standard American’s dysfunctional relationship with food often stems from a lack of familiarity and comfort in the kitchen. I’d also probably be talking about how cooking for friends and family is a fundamental joy of being human, and how sharing a meal with kith and kin is the root of all society.

While I do believe all those things (more or less), the joy of walking to the store isn’t directly rooted in my belief system around food and cooking. Rather, having my trips for a basic need be divided out across multiple days forces me to interact with my community in a meaningful way. It might be corny, but I think society really is built up from little interactions like chatting with cashiers at the grocery store. We all want to be part of a strong community – and that means participation.

Sounds great, but is it practical for you to do this? It’s complicated of course.

The above map is a snippet of all grocery stores in Portland, overlain with a half-mile walk radius. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, especially considering that the source data still includes a local chain that went out of business recently. The more central (and urban) parts of the city tend to have a good variety of options, while 82nd Ave has a seemingly infinite array of Asian markets. In semi-suburban areas or dogmatically residential ones there’s a tendency for there to be one or zero choices, which can make it far more challenging to be a walk to the store sort of person.

Truly walkable cities need to be able to provide this, and unfortunately Portland tends to be just okay on this front. The South Waterfront in particular stands out, in part because it’s a fancy new high-rise district anchored by the largest employer in the region (OHSU). I find it to be a sterile environment, with strangely low amounts of foot traffic given how dense the housing is.

Would a grocery store solve all this? It’s hard to say for sure. I think at a minimum, it would help quite a lot. Anecdotally, one of my new classmates in the MURP program at PSU lives here – he says that he drives to the Whole Foods in the Pearl for groceries. I reckon he’d walk if there was a store in the direct area.

I talked recently about my love of Cinema Urbanism, but I think that more than anything the grocery store is the true indicator of a healthy urban space. Everyone needs to eat after all, and without a viable choice within a reasonable walk either parking, cars, and supermarkets dominate. In the event where someone lives in a place like this without a car, they end up having a lack of access to affordable and nutritious food. This of course comes with a whole host of social issues, that are beyond the scope of this post.

Ultimately, the larger point is about choosing to live a life that is interesting to you. Walking to the store provides me with so much – the satisfaction of a walk, the joy of crafting a recipe on the fly while looking for sales, and the pleasure of getting out in the world more often. I hope that your choices of transportation to your basic needs give you just as much as they give me.