My wife and I were grocery shopping again. We have this ongoing struggle that neither of us speak of but that both of us are acutely aware. Actually that’s kind of bullshit. I speak about it all the time but she doesn’t. I like to stockpile stuff. If we’re buying spaghetti then I don’t understand why we buy one bag at a time. My wife claims that we have limited storage and so we can’t just buy multiple items willy nilly. This disagreement in shopping philosophy is why I’m asked to not go to Cost-Co unaccompanied.
So, we always run out of shit and we’re at the grocery store more than we need to be. My wife loved grocery shopping in Europe. There were markets, and each day she was pleased to wander around and look at shit and talk to people. Also, the selection was different from what we’re accustomed to and there was always a multitude of fresh vegetables and bread and pastry and all sorts of other miscellaneous crap. I think that our grocery stores provide the same effect for her as Europe. Only here, we can read all of the food labels and we have seasonal availability of certain items. Also on the plus side, the odds are better that she’s going to run into people to talk with.
So, shopping is an adventure.
I’m pretty sure she’s bullshitting me about storage space. We have a stand-up dedicated freezer. We have two fridges and one of them has a freezer. We have cupboards and we have one of those vacuum sealers, plus a pantry, so I hold a different opinion on our available storage. It doesn’t matter though. I can see clearly that I’ll never ever win this argument.
Anyway, we’re standing in Safeway again having the same discussion we have every day. Sometimes we have the discussion in the grocery store and sometimes we have the discussion at home. The what do you want for supper discussion. We’re comfortable carnivores and so the decision around what to eat always begins with a deceased animal. Fish, cow, pig or chicken. Sometimes turkey and veal or lamb, but we always start with something that has at one point both breathed and pooped.
I can’t imagine how vegans have this discussion without meat being an option. I guess a person gets creative with sauces and shit but it seems to me that once you remove creatures from your shopping list then the decisions get a hell of a lot more limited.
Sometimes I stand in the produce section and hold a head of cauliflower and wonder about how much misery accompanied this vegetable on it’s journey to my plate. I wonder if a migrant harvested it in a sweltering sun for minimal peso’s. I wonder if this object in my hand is Monsanto altered and I wonder how many tree’s got cut down to plant millions of these fuckers. I wonder about the habitat that was destroyed to fill every grocery store in every city and town in Canada. I wonder about how many different pesticides invaded the groundwater to protect this brain like looking vegetable I’m holding. I wonder if we can wash off e-coli and I wonder if the vegans think about these things.
But we buy it anyway because if we don’t then we’re going to be hungry. There’s nothing quite like a little hunger to dull the edges of an omnivores conscience, and it’s a challenge to feel sorry for cauliflower.
Grocery stores have also convinced me that the majority doesn’t rule. That might seem like an out of the blue statement but consider a few things. I was buying fruit juice. For some reason the label on the bottle in my hand read that this juice was both Kosher and Halal. What the fuck? Does that mean a rabbi and an imam were there to see how the fucking oranges were slaughtered? I don’t think that Jews and Muslims are the majority of people in Canada but for some reason the grocers have decided to take the extra time and cost to ensure orange fucking juice is prepared in accordance with their mythologies. So, orange juice is prepared and marketed for the minority, not the majority.
I think it’s the same with free range and organic. Most people don’t spend a huge amount of time wondering if a chicken got to run around for a year before it was mass exterminated, eviscerated and packaged for our consumption. Some people do care though, and so we have a section that caters to them and it’s more expensive. I struggle a bit with this. I’ve never been standing over a mixture of hot oil and melted butter and wondered if the chicken breast I’m about to immerse was happy for the year it lived. I’ve eaten organic meat and vegetables. I can’t tell the difference but evidently there’s a section of the population that feels better roasting a chicken that got to run around.
I try to stay away from the organic section. The pall of sanctimony makes breathing a challenge, and I’m not interested in being exposed to measles or whooping cough.
Then there’s gluten. First of all where the fuck did gluten intolerance come from? Did we ingest so much of it that people reached a saturation point, or did the wheat get one last genetic tweak that spawned this epidemic of intolerance? I don’t know, but I do know that as of yet the gluten challenged are a minority but still have their own sections of the grocery aisles.
Minority rule isn’t limited to grocery stores. It’s everywhere. Braille lettering on pedestrian crossings for example. There aren’t very many blind people around but all the hand buttons to activate the crosswalk have braille. Another minority accommodation.
Then there are the work and public and airplane and transit and school bans to protect the minority. Peanuts are like the black death of modern times. People are dropping just from the smell or a few airborne particles that escaped. So we ban peanuts instead of handing a mask to the person that views cashews like superman views kryptonite. Minority rules again.
I always wonder how these people have survive this long when a fucking legume is a death sentence.
I worked in a place where there were hundreds of employee’s. One day a notice was posted that one (1) individual had been diagnosed with an allergy to coconuts. Seriously, fucking coconuts. As a result coconuts and all coconut products were banned from the office. Oil, lotions, baking and whatever else coconut may be in was outlawed because of one (1) person.
Shortly thereafter, another employee announced they were allergic to perfume and cologne. Truth be told, I’m not sure if that ban was a total ban. The announcement language spoke to wearing a surplus of body odor repellant but didn’t ban it outright. Still, one (1) person was making the rules for hundreds.
Everyone had to abide by the rules set for and by the minority.
I had this fantasy of opening a take out container of coconut shrimp and watching half the lunchroom go into anaphylactic shock. Then when security arrived on the scene I’d ward them off with a peanut butter sandwich and clear my escape route with a bottle of Axe deodorant.
I think the continued accommodation of minority requirements is starting to make certain members of the majority kind of crazy. What’s weird about minority rule though is what provides the eye tick to the unstable majority member. Why would you choose to lose your shit over a transsexual washroom, and not the fact that 100 billionaires are buying legislators and making rules that make them trillionaires? Why come completely fucking unglued because there’s another gay parade and not give one shit that a half dozen mega-corporations own all of the food supply and processing in the world?
There are after all different types of minority groups. There is in my estimation a simple method to decide if a minority is dangerous.
If they’re quiet then they’re dangerous.