According to the digital thermometer it is six below, Fahrenheit. The horizons are crystallized in a band of orange and contrasted with the deep blue of the sub-arctic sky. The sun is out of sight now, but while the land is in shadow, the clouds over the mountains refract the last rays of the sun and tinge the peaks with alpenglow. I will always marvel at the ability of my Creator to bend light in water and make a white mountain turn pink in shadow. What a wonderful world.
We need a tomato and a bunch of cilantro to fill out the menu for Taco Tuesday. What is a Tuesday without tacos? I park the car and leave the engine running, worry briefly about theft, but glance reassured at the security cameras on the side of the store. I’ll take the risk of theft for the luxury of a warm car. The door to the supermarket opens without any physical effort on my behalf, which is nice. A man on a mission shouldn’t be opening and closing all kinds of doors. The store is large and new and clean. What a wonderful world.
The marvel of the supermarket strikes me as a magnificent display of human engineering and progress. It is a sensual experience, shopping in a place like this, with these colors and shapes to please the eye. And the prospects! Rows of colorfully packaged foods stretch away: Doritos, and lime-flavored Tostitos, and fruit-flavored snacks. Faux whipped cream in an aerosol can (who would have thought it?). In the camping aisle, you might buy fire starter or a waterproof match case, a bug net or a whistle with a little compass in the top in case you get lost in the wild howling wilderness.
But the fresh food section is the real delight. Here is the marvel of modern logistics, where one can have vegetables from different continents year-round and have them relatively stable. A Pharoah never dined with such prospects.
Glistening, fresh-looking vegetables line shelves on three sides, arranged artsy-like. Rhubarb, cilantro, parsley, two varieties of lettuce, spinach, kale, peppers, individually wrapped cucumbers. Asparagus in December, in Alaska! I meditate briefly on the prospect of asparagus sauteed in olive oil, in a sheet pan supper with potatoes and chicken and carrots, and then glance at the price, also briefly. What a wonderful world, in which you can have asparagus in December.
What I’m after is a tomato. We are having tacos, after all, and what is a taco without fresh salsa? And what more countercultural food might one enjoy in the dead of winter, west of the 140th longitude and the north of the 50th latitude? But never mind that. We can, so we will, thank you. What a wonderful world.
(Aside: One of the greatest marvels of human nature is our capacity for ungratefulness and forgetfulness. Not only have we forgotten that the industrial miracle of citrus and vegetables thousands of miles from where they are grown is a modern feat, but we accept this miracle to be so commonplace that we if we cannot buy any vegetable any day of the year at the store next door, we consider it failure of management.)
What store would not have a tomato? I ask an employee, who is carrying a water hose, where I might find the fruit of the vine. She gestures wordlessly to a four-cornered display rack with a sloping, compartmentalized top. Options. They have three varieties: a Roma, shaped like a miniature hand grenade, and some little cherry-tomato-sized, pastel-colored nuggets of extraordinary toughness. They also have a Basic Tomato, which is a pale red, and if I am any judge, will have solid, watery, tasteless inside that is more pink than red and filled with various chemicals, the antibiotic glyphosate among them. But it is on sale, and anyway, this is the price one pays for tomatoes in December or for not growing them himself. I buy two.
When I look up, the employee has tightened the hose to a water tap in the frame of the vegetable keeper and is misting water over the vegetables. The vegetables and fruits now glisten afresh as if touched with the dew of heaven. I could have known that Florida and California vegetables do not retain their dew en route, but it startles me nonetheless.
In the top section of the fruit rack are tubular, individually wrapped “Fruit Rolls.” The audacity! To mix non-foods with fruit and not mean it as a joke! I want to meet the plant that grows “Fruit Rolls.”
While I’m at it, I want to meet the chicken with no bones in his wings. I want to see the milk that produces Cheez Whiz or that suspicious yellow stuff they call a “cheese product.” And Marshmallows. Every time you ask someone, “What is a marshmallow?” They look at you as though you don’t know a hawk from a handsaw. A marshmallow is a marshmallow, stupid; it exists and therefore is an item in the world. Marshmallows just are and few have thought to ask why. I reject that. We ought to ask why.
(Aside: Marshmallows do have a historical precedent, but rest assured those Jet Puffs are a long way from anything the ancient Egyptians might have made from the herb Althaea officinalis.)
I turn the corner to the frozen foods aisle. I always feel like a fraud in the frozen foods aisle, because everything looks…inauthentic. But who cares about authenticity? Is authenticity the price we pay for convenience? Reduce it to an argument for essentialism: does it matter to anyone when we don’t get the real thing? Why does a facsimile not produce for us what we need? Do we care if we are looking at the Mona Lisa or a print? Do we care if we eat cheese or a cheese product? I see no future in nominalism, myself. What a wonderful world.
A buxom lady pushes a grocery cart with a seven or eight year-old sitting cross-legged inside the basket. This child, who seems to be perfectly mobile, if slightly well-fed and not accustomed to climbing anything higher than a sofa, has climbed inside the basket of the grocery cart and is running a campaign for dinner. “Pizza! Mozzarella sticks! Hot pockets!”
What a wonderful world. Feeling superior with my bag of herbs and fruit (but no Fruit Rolls), I hurry past into the checkout line. The lady behind the counter cranks out a manufactured, “Good evening.” And I reply, “Good evening, I hope you are well,” just to save her the bother of replying. Behind the counter there’s a glossy magazine: WHY BRAD PITT ISN’T TALKING. Maybe it’s because he has nothing to say, eh? My bill is $12.48, my share of the conversation about what is produced in the world. Mechanically, I tap to pay with my customized credit card. What a wonderful world.
Then, unbidden, come the stories I know of cheap food, the story of industrialism with its underbelly. Does being a consumer make me accomplice to these stories? The Grapes of Wrath and Fast Food Nation and The Worst Hard Time hover in my vision, books I cannot scrub from my consciousness. I no longer see merely a supermarket of possibilities and goods, but, well, never mind what I see.
It has me coming and going: I am dependent on it, dependent on the migrant workers, the displacement of rural farmers, the government subsidies. If the migrants stop working for pittance, I cannot have tacos on Tuesday. They are my brothers, and I wish a better life for them. But I do like fresh salsa in December.
Like the poet Wendell Berry would say:
Nothing is simple,
Not even simplification.
And I hurry out to my waiting car under the deep blue of a sub-arctic sky, into the warm bosom of the machine. What a wonderful world.