Lawrence Hall
Amid the Alien
Whole-Kernel Corn
Given that most of humanity has always lived on the edge
of starvation, the ordinary (to us) grocery store is an adventure in
consumerism and culture: coffee from Colombia, tea from Sri Lanka (which was
Ceylon before it watched too much television), bananas from Nicaragua, olive
oil from Italy, herring from Norway, and summer vegetables shipped from
California at all seasons. Sugar-sodden snacks pose seductively only an aisle
away from the ascetic whole-grain breads, and diet sodas vamp desperately for
the shopper’s attention like aging pop stars layered in makeup.
Shopping the supermarket is like shopping the world, and
presumably the rest of the world enjoys effective means of transporting
groceries back to the house, flat, yurt, tent, or trailer. In the USA, it might be time for us to bring
our own bags to the grocery store.
Not so long ago grocery sacks were made of heavy brown
paper. When the sackboy, showing off a
bit, swung it in a great arc against the air the sack opened with a very
satisfying “pop,” ready for action. The good
old paper grocery sack was sturdy and capacious, and once the groceries were
stored away at home the sacks went on to second careers as costume masks,
school projects, and useful (though not
fashionable) beach and overnight bags, and for carrying one’s own garden
produce to friends. The cloud of
polysyllabic adjectives condemning the use of paper grocery sacks as a crime
against red-headed toadfrogs or something is just a darned lie.
Later the customer was given a choice, paper or plastic,
and the plastic, too, was good stuff.
Primitive plastic grocery sacks were manly ones, quite capable of
telling that “Hefty, Hefty, Hefty” upstart where to get off.
Alas that now shoppers in the land of Manifest Destiny have
no choice. Grocery bags are plastic only,
and nouveau plastic of such a flimsy,
vaporous quality that they are no more substantial than a political party’s
platform. Groceries that could be toted
in two or three substantial paper bags are now wrapped into six or seven little
puffs of weak, thin film. These diaphanous
fancies are carefully designed to fall apart, like an environmentalist’s
excuses, between your car and your back door.
A modern plastic grocery bag is not strong enough to hold
even a pound of coffee, but that works out okay because there are no one-pound
cans of coffee anymore. Coffee is now
sold 12 ounces at a time in cardboard cylinders. One supposes that an honest pound of coffee
was detrimental to the rain forest, which used be a fine old jungle before it began
taking night classes at community college and got all sensitive.
Shopping carts have changed little; they’re still made of
steel, rattle like crazy, and feature errant wheels that are determined to
steer the cart to India even though you are trying to tack against them to the
frozen foods. I have been in grocery
stores where the shopping carts were made of plastic atop obedient wheels, but
that somehow seemed a little too Martha’s Vineyard or something. Real Americans demand noisy, oppositional, steel
shopping carts with a little fight in them.
Your old Granny thumped the melons, smelled the steaks, palpated
the bread, and eyed the ground Charles carefully because she knew what she was
doing. Now most food products, even
bananas and apples, are decorated with health and safety labels, but I’d rather
trust Granny’s diagnosis than some propaganda about how an apple was grown by
barefoot beatniks invoking karma-ness and the spirit of Alan Watts.
But, hey, it’s all organic, natural, farm-fresh, and good
for the environment, right? After all,
the label says so, and who can argue with a label?
Coffee in cardboard and fooofy grocery sacks that exhibit
the tensile strength of water vapor, well, we can cope, but how sadly
progressive that sackboys no longer wear aprons, white shirts, and bow
ties. They looked sharp in a Little
House on the Prairie-goes-to-town-on-Saturday sort of way. I kinda miss that.
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