Got Milk?

 

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

There’s an old saying that “you are what you eat,” and to certain extent, I suppose that’s true.  Scary, of course, but mostly true.  Then again, what you eat depends a lot on what you’ve got around to eat.  So, maybe it’s more accurate to say that you are what you would eat. 

I think people with families to feed have it easier in some ways when it comes to food, though.  Of course, the meal prep and the cleanup are bigger hassles.  When you’re only feeding yourself, you can eat right out the can with your bare hands if you want to.  It’s not like anyone is going to object.  But there does seem to be something about a child’s ability to use silverware that somehow makes parents feel like they’ve done their jobs.  So, even now, if my mother calls while I’m eating tuna straight out of the handy-dandy foil pouch, I always mention that I’m using a fork.  She seems to find that comforting.  Don’t ask me why.

And I don’t know if actual grocery shopping is easier if you have a family or not.  One day, I saw a woman in the store with a completely full cart and three little kids in tow…AND she was using coupons.  It was amazing.  I mean, I have a good deal of respect and admiration for firefighters who run into burning buildings, but I was utterly in awe of that woman.  If I had had the money, I would’ve paid for her groceries myself.  After all, I think that kind of bravery really should be rewarded.

But shopping for one is a completely different experience.  People always say that you should never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry.  But that’s the only reason I ever go grocery shopping.  I mean, if I’m not hungry, why would I go buy some food?  That just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Now, I realize that there are lovely, responsible people on their own who plan ahead and stock up on food accordingly.  I am not one of those people.  I just figure I’ll worry about what’s for dinner when it’s dinnertime.  Besides, if I go to the grocery store when I’m not hungry, I tend not to buy any actual food.  Instead, I come home with 48 rolls of 9-ply toilet paper, an entire selection of coma-inducing cold medicine, and batteries.  Lots and lots of batteries.

And I don’t know what it is about the As Seen on TV aisle that holds such special meaning for me, but if I get anywhere near that section when I’m shopping without being hungry, it’s like being enticed into an opium den.  I mean, I can’t even figure out what half of that stuff is supposed to do, but who cares?  Some little thing will catch my eye, and it’s like I can’t turn away.  I’m totally mesmerized by that thing.  It folds up, it folds out, it expands, it contracts, it absorbs, it repels.  It’s magic!  Magic, I tell you!  And I must have it.  Even if I don’t have any idea what it is.

Of course, when I am hungry, I’m not that much better at shopping.  When you’re single, you can eat whatever you want to eat whenever you want to eat it.  And while that might seem oddly freeing, trust me, it isn’t.  I don’t know how many times I’ve come home with ten pounds of some kind of fish I’ve never even heard of.  I can’t count how many jars of cocktail onions have found their way into my cart.  And every now and then, I just go into an absolute crouton mania.  There’s just no telling what I might buy.  I remember coming home one time only to find that after I’d put all the food away, my entire freezer was filled up with nothing but frozen waffles and vodka. 

I’ve tried the idea of making a list before I go to the store, but it never quite works out.  After all, I don’t have time to make a list.  I’m hungry.  I need some food right now. 

At one point, though, I tried keeping a rolling list that I would work on from time to time so that when I got hungry, I could just snatch it up and head off to the store.  The problem was that lists like that tend to be rather, well, optimistic.  It was more a list of what I thought I should eat rather than what I actually do eat.  So, I’d write down stuff like string beans and peas and low-fat milk and bananas, and then I’d get to the store and wonder, “Who broke into my house and made up this list?”  And then I’d end up going home with a TV dinner, a jar of pesto sauce, and this lingering feeling of guilt and shame.  So, I gave up on that idea a long time ago.  If there’s one thing I don’t need in my life, it’s the stress of trying to live up to my grocery list.

My strangest grocery shopping experiences, though, were back when I was finishing college.  One summer, a friend of mine and I were both working on the graveyard shift as janitors for the university, and since we needed to keep our nocturnal schedules over the weekends, we did our grocery shopping at about 3am on Saturday nights.  Back then, the 24-hour grocery store was a completely new thing, so it seemed like an adventure.  A really weird, kind of creepy, sort of scary adventure, but an adventure nonetheless.

Of course, the 24-hour grocery store in our town was really kind of seedy and cut-rate.  Their big selling point was that their prices were lower because you had to bag your own groceries.  Personally, I think their prices were lower because they never cleaned the place or bothered to replace any of the continually flickering overhead lights.  Just walking into that store was like being sucked into a scene out of a David Lynch movie.  From what I could tell, they employed nothing but drug addicts.  Even the customers looked strangely vacant and potentially dangerous. 

I don’t actually remember the name of the store, but they really should’ve just called it The Random Junk and Crap Grocery Store because that’s about what it amounted to. When you walked in, you really sort of expected to see an aisle sign that read “Bloated and Dented Canned Goods.”  A section of completely mislabeled food items wouldn’t have been out of place, and to be honest, this was the kind of store that would happily sell you an opened box cereal or a half-eaten sandwich.  I think their whole business plan was based on a mixture of apathetic capitalism and brutal honesty.  They didn’t know anything about food safety, and they weren’t trying to hide it.  But if you insisted on buying groceries from them, they wouldn’t try to stop you.

One of the most entertaining parts of the store was a section located beyond an entire aisle of used cardboard boxes they were trying to sell and just to the side of a fairly disreputable-looking dairy case.  That last section was the kind of area that really should’ve been called something like Stuff That Fell Off the Back of a Truck.  You never knew what you might find back there.  Boxes of prime rib, cases of scotch, Barbie Dream Houses, tube socks.  There was really no telling.  Whenever I went back to that area, I always sort of expected to find some heavy-set guys sitting around smoking cigars and playing poker.  But really, if I’d come upon a chorus line of dancing midgets, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

The funny thing is that as strange as that store was, my friend and I kept going there.  After all, they did actually have lower prices, and as long as you made sure that whatever you bought wasn’t misshapen or giving off a foul odor, you were pretty safe.  Besides, back then, bagging your own groceries seemed oddly empowering.  It was like the store was entrusting you with a sacred duty, and that made you more than just a customer.  You were an integral part of the machinery that was The Random Junk and Crap Grocery Store.  Whether or not that was something you wanted to admit to your friends was a whole other story.

Of course, the 24-hour grocery store is a really common thing these days although shopping at 3am is still a lot like being trapped in an episode of The Twilight Zone with little snippets of the movie Dune thrown in just to confuse you.  What makes shopping even stranger, though, is that the Stuff That Fell Off the Back of a Truck section seems to be a staple in a lot of the bigger, super-grocery stores.  In fact, it’s taken over about half the space of those stores.  And I might just be Old School, but I don’t ever think I’ll understand that.  I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with knowing that the grocery store that sells me milk and eggs is also willing to sell me a car and finance the loan.  My mind just can’t expand quite that far.

My mom, of course, thinks the idea of the grocery super-store is great because it’s more convenient.  I mean, to her, if you need groceries and a new couch, what could be better than finding it all in one place?  And I suppose she’s got a point.  It really is a lot more convenient.  But for someone like me, it’s also a lot more dangerous.  After all, if I find myself in a regular grocery store now without being hungry, the worst thing that will happen is that I’ll go home with five rolls of non-stick aluminum foil, two boxes of dryer sheets, and a loofah sponge.  And frankly, there are worse things I could do.

But the grocery super-store is just a disaster waiting to happen for someone like me because suddenly I’m not just walking out with a package of light bulbs. I’m walking out with a new set of patio furniture. I’m not just buying a new dustpan. I’m buying a lawn vacuum.  And I don’t even have a lawn.  Or a patio.

What scares me most about it all, though, is that I really do believe that you are what you look around your kitchen and decide you would eat.  So I’m perfectly willing to say that I am ten pounds of lutefisk.  I’ll own up to being a jar of maraschino cherries.  I’ll stand on the highest mountain and proudly proclaim that I am a crouton.  But I’m just dreading the first time I go into a grocery super-store when I actually am hungry.  The sheer number of products will be overwhelming, and I have no doubt that I’ll eventually return home dazed, confused, and probably slightly motion sick only to have to look myself straight in the mirror and face the fact that I am a radial tire.

All in all, I miss the days when I was a little kid going grocery shopping with my mom.  My whole job then, at least as far as I understood it, was to hang off the cart and grab random things off the shelves.  These days, I’d happily pay some little kid to do that for me.  Hell, I’d pay a grown-up to do that for me.  But there’s something about being a grown-up yourself that makes people think you should have mastered the fine art of grocery shopping by now.  And I suppose that to some extent, I have at least reached some level of competency when it comes to buying food.  After all, I haven’t starved to death yet.  Still, whenever I see some parent in the store with a child, there’s always some part of me that just wants to lean down and say, “Kid, you don’t know how good you’ve got it.”  But, hey, I’m an adult, so I just gather up my tube of cake frosting, my bottle of soy sauce, and my block of cheese because, you know, it’s dinner time.  And I’m hungry.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.