I was at my local supermarket yesterday.  It's the one closest to the new apartment.  Though my Whole Foods is only a few blocks away, I know I'll end up going here a lot once I move in the fall.  I'll say this: for the Midwestern white trash '70s style cuisine of my youth, give me a cruddy supermarket in an urban enterprise zone over a suburban new age food emporium any day.



The problem with trying to recreate the cuisine of your youth with ingredients from Whole Foods is everything ends up a pale, healthy substitute.  I mean, you just can't make healthy food taste anywhere as junky as the junk food of yesteryear.  Even bacon.  I got some humanely raised uncured bacon the other day and it was positively blah. Ordinary bacon, you can taste the fear and chemicals. This newfangled pampered pork just doesn't compare.

I like the idea — I read it in the New York Times recently — of just genetically lobotomizing factory farm animals.  Sort of the March of the Zombie Pigs.  I mean, hey, we're gonna eat you, nothing can stop us, and we don't have time to love and coddle you before we do.  I mean, we've got a lot of eating to do, bitches. Nothing personal, you just happen to be on the wrong end of the food chain. So, rather than change the way we torture you before we boil you alive, why don't we just gently genetically modify you so that you don't really mind it so much?

Ah, things were so much simpler before Babe.

The trick with healthy food is to start from square one. Since most people my age didn't grow up eating it, we don't really have a reference point.  I've learned not to try to make anything that resembles anything I've had before if I want to enjoy it and not be overcome with paralyzing nostalgia for a lost culinary world.

It was actually living abroad all those years that taught me the futility of living in the past, culinarily speaking.  You get those cravings occasionally for something you used to love, but when you try to recreate it, it's such a miserable simulacrum you realize it only spoils the memory to try to relive it.

Anyway, this cruddy supermarket is straight from the '70s. And even though it's surely not long for this world — the area is coming up — it's not just students and old folks anymore — I don't think they'll get around to improving it much in the next year or two. 

Things in the neighborhood are in a state of suspended animation.  Just look at the burnt husk of Restaurant Row, which, it's now beyond obvious is never coming back.  Owner Monty Gold is playing the same game the developers of the old Filene's lot are — wait long enough and the city will drop any and all demands and actually pay you to put something, anything, on it.

So, for now, I'm stuck with my cruddy Star Market.  It's one of those depressing supermarkets where sad singles go to shop and they're always playing the Carpenters on the PA.  I guess it's sort of comforting in an awful way.  

And the checkout clerks are by far the awfullest thing in the place.  I try to use the self-check-out whenever possible, but they've only got two and one's usually on the fritz.  Still, sometimes it's better to wait than to go with a human there.  No matter how frustrating a machine can be, there's no karma in the mix.  They can't pass off their misery or simmering rage to you which you then have to find a way to pass on to someone else.

The last time I was there I had the transgendered check-out clerk with the Bo Derek braids who was waiting to ring up a millionaire.  Talk about depressing.  With Karen Carpenter mourning "Goodbye to Love" in the background. Priceless.

But this time I got a fat, sassy one, with ten minutes left on the clock.  Kiss of death.  And both self-check-out machines were on the blink.  It had only been a mildly depressing adventure up to that point, I'd only had a few odds and ends to get — some yogurt, an ear of corn (I'm doing this new Dr. Oz Corn-Yogurt Blow-out), and Karen was in her creepy happy place ("Touch Me When We're Dancing") — so I thought maybe I might slip by without getting dumped on.

Unfortunately I arrived without notice just as she was finishing with another customer. So just when she thought she was going to get a breather, a chance to banter with her bagger, here comes another one. 

I smiled wanly as she glared at me with that "oh no you di'int" look.

"Hi, how are you?" I ventured. 

"I'm fine," she said flatly, with a roll of her eyeballs and a curt little smile.

No "how are you?" back.  No nothing back.

You could tell she was proud of herself.  This constitutes a clever comeback for some people.  As no less a queen bitch than Gore Vidal once observed: "I can think of no greater pleasure than to approach an open face and swiftly say whatever needs to be said to shut it."

Yes, well played, Madam Clerk.  Well played.

The rest of the transaction was handled with consummate professionalism, and topped off with a triumphant little smile when she thanked me for shopping at Star Market.

I hear they're working on genetically modified supermarket check-out clerks who can recognize pain but can't feel it.  After all, the future is the past, without feeling.

I just hope they let us boil them alive in the end.