ABSTRACT
In writing about the literature of postmodernity, with its sci-fi tropes of ‘speed-up, global village[s] [and] overcoming spatial barriers’, the geographer Doreen Massey has advanced the more modest proposition that ‘Much of life for many people still consists of waiting in a busshelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes’ (Massey, 1994: 163). Although it is conceivable that the shoppers’ bags are bursting with durables or luxury goods, it seems much more likely that they contain food. The purchase of food is what most of us mean, most of the time, when we say we are going shopping.
