I grab a bite to eat. I grab a drink to go with my lunchtime meal deal. I head back to the office, in time to grab a quick nap. Here I am, fully engaging in grab culture.
Eat food away from a table and you too can consider yourself to be grabbing it, at least according to the brands who want to sell it to you. Greggs, that resurgent force in the world of discount baked goods, invites us to “grab” everything from its doughnuts to its breakfast butties. According to Subway’s signage, the only apparent way to get their “sub of the day” is by grabbing one. McDonald’s opened its first ‘Grab-and-Go’ restaurant in London earlier this year—a kind of drive-through for the carless—and fancy vegan face-stuffery like Livia’s “Biccy Boms” also make use of the “Grab N Go” formula. All things now are up for grabs.
It is worth asking what kind of a culture goes around grabbing everything in sight. After all, the ubiquitous invitation to “grab some food” is a deeply strange one when you stop to think about it. Any impressionistic sense that “grabbing” is not such a wholesome thing is amply confirmed by the (excellent) leading definition of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘To grasp or seize suddenly and eagerly; hence, to appropriate to oneself in a rapacious or unscrupulous manner.” Rapaciousness! This is the kind of grabbing a Dickens villain does, at a cloak or cane, before rampaging out of the room. Grabbing as a rapacious activity, then: an aggressively greedy way of going about business.
‘Grab-and-go’ is an industry term for the consumer’s supposed desire for convenience culture on the move, and it is no passing trend. The food industry magazine The Caterer reported in 2017 that the grab-and-go market is worth £20 billion a year and rising. We could endlessly moralise about the state of our grab-happy nation, or instead we could try to work out what it is advertising agencies and marketing departments think they are doing when they tell us to grab.
What quality do they think they’ve seen in public, that they expect it will grab and then go? Walkers no doubt call their larger packets of crisps ‘Grab Bags’ because ‘grab bag’ is an existing expression, meaning ‘random selection’—but there isn’t anything random in sight, and the idea that anyone needs their food to be more readily grabble seems contemptuous. Perhaps, by telling us to grab, these companies want us to instil in ourselves the qualities of grabbers; a nation of consumers snatching their way through the high-street—“suddenly and eagerly,” as the OED puts it—is probably the ideal notion of the marketplace, in the eyes of those who vend. Grabbing rather neatly describes so many of the mechanics of neoliberalism and the free-market, so it does make a perverted sort of sense to apply it to the things we literally consume, too.
Part of the reason the label has stuck, no doubt, is that it wants to flatter us—we all like the idea, overworked as we are, that we are busy people. There is an obvious sense of purpose which comes with identifying as an essentially busy being. Grab Food, a Deliveroo-style service popular in in Southeast Asia, is directly complicit in this logic, touting on its website the maxim ‘No more skipping lunch, no matter how busy.’
That sounds weirdly parental—“don’t forget to eat your lunch, dear!”—while at the same time it congratulates us on having too little free time to even take on calories. This might be because a positive side of the change in our consumer habits over the last twenty or so years is that the people who used to oversee packed-lunches are now themselves empowered to work; meanwhile, marketeers are trying to take up the mantle of mealtimes on our behalf. And where our mothers told us not to grab, we’re now encouraged to do so.
Grabbing is good business practice—preferably to be done with both hands. The Wall Street Bull is a symbol of a stock market ready to be grabbed by its horns. Power-grabs, asset-grabs, and land-grabs are opportunistic (and often illegal) attempts to maximise one’s influence or income. And then there’s that paragon of the businessperson, President Donald Trump, and his advice to his friends on the subject of women: “Grab them by the pussy.”
In the latter case, thinking you have the right to grab at another human being threatens to turn that person into a kind of commodity, at least in your own mind. Grabbing, of this frankly astonishing type, indicates the presumption of power and entitlement, whilst it denigrates other people into objects: objects in the street to be circumnavigated, objects that form queues or traffic ahead of us that we might want to skip, objects filling our country and taking our jobs. All of which might sound like hyperbole, were it not for the explicitly grab-happy hands of the commander in chief.
We’re told not to grab as children, because it performs a logic of entitlement: this thing is mine, I deserve it more than you, I am more important than you. And yet here we are, grabbing and going on with our busy lives. All this grabbing, at any rate, feels like it’s only a hair’s breadth away from developing into the related activity of shoving. And so long as government keeps on its steady path towards a no-deal Brexit, grabbing might become an exemplary mode of self-conduct and self-preservation: snatching at and stockpiling cans of soup before someone else gets their hands on them.
Certainly, the recent police campaign to encourage us to keep a ‘grab bag’ packed, on the off-chance that we might soon need to flee our homes due to some unspeakable looming threat, seems weirdly parodic of the whole culture—as if ‘grabbing lunch’ sits on the same spectrum as Walking Dead-style post-apocalyptic survival. It’s enough to make you want to slow down—or maybe even stand still—and have a think about where we’re headed.
