I’d have a $20 bill and I’d be set for a week in those mid-’80s days. Ten-pound bag of potatoes, a few cans of soup, bags of rice and noodles from the food bank, and enough money left for a six-pack of Schmidt and a couple of candy bars for the weekend.
Finally got a decent, full-time job in the late ’80s and moved to my first decent apartment in Fremont, next door to the Fremont Classic Pizzeria. I still remember the cashier…. Every Sunday I got a large pizza to build up my credit ranking.
I loved going to Marketime every day. Now I’m buying good beer, in bottles, the weird microbrews suddenly, miraculously rampant. Twenty dollars a week spending money? Not any more, baked potato breath! Fifty dollars wasn’t unheard of.
Now we go to PCC every Sunday with the goal of staying under $140. Don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that.
When I was a boy, food could be trusted, we thought. If food was in cans, that had to be because cans (and plastic containers) would shelter and preserve the goodness of the food.
All those chemicals– science, right? Although soft drinks– we would read the ingredients sometimes and try not to think about it. What is the taste of Coca-Cola, anyway? Can’t really think about these things.
Enter the new Puritans. My wife is one of these shoppers whose approach amounts to an overturning and reinvention of the food industry as, in my life, it has been known.
Food will not come in cans or plastics. Obviously, those materials consist of substances that just might, by the tiniest bit, contaminate the food with pollutants that will accumulate and not play nice with the human body. (Glass, paper, and some other things are okay.)
Non-vegetarian food is mostly horrific, meaning, all those rows of canned meat products, benign though the many varieties of chili seem to be, one must answer to the reality of the so-called lives of the chicken, cattle, sheep, pigs, overfished fish, lives truly “nasty, brutish, and short.” At some point, one wants nothing to do with all that, especially with relatively humane alternatives available.
As some people sensibly eschew any type of drugs in their lives, nowadays the default choice of sustenance is to choose food grown in clean soil, not exposed to pesticides and questionable fertilizers, grown by people with a kindred philosophy of prioritizing a clean environment, relocating human agriculture within a greater web that allows a full spectrum of ecosystems.
Buying the cheapest stuff, eating anything without thinking about it– I miss those days. Not because they were better– just because, I guess, I had the best of that world, as I knew it, as I have the best of the world now, as I know it, this world in which one always longs for a better future for this world, this life that is never without a taste of deep sadness.