Lost in the Supermarket
Supermarkets try too hard. You can’t walk into a supermarket anymore that doesn’t have a full selection of “Home-Cooked Meals”: hermetically sealed roasted chicken, baked hams in little plastic coffins, and ribs sulking in oversweetened barbecue sauce.
One day, I got to thinking. Why not take the next step, and have a potluck aisle? You could have everybody in the neighborhood bring something, and sell it all on consignment. There’d be aisles of steam tables piled with goulash, mashed potatoes, creamed corn, and all the stuff that someone found in the back of some Betty Crocker cookbook, some of it edible, some not. After all, what potluck is complete without at least one or two dishes that can be identified only by their dental records, or by some kind of culinary DNA analysis?
There’d also have to be long, folding, metal tables, with those cheap, red-and-white check flannel-backed tablecloths, where you’d find platters of deviled eggs, potato salad, cole slaw, and that macaroni salad with the tuna that somebody always makes. Maybe some pies and cakes, a styrofoam cooler with ice, soda, and beer.
And don’t forget the watermelon. You’d hear, “Seeds in aisle twelve!” and a guy would come with a mop, cleaning up the seeds and watermelon juice, since you can’t have watermelon without having seed fights. Maybe the watermelon juice is the real reason that one wheel on the shopping cart is always stuck, which in turn suggests to me that the supermarkets already have potluck sections, and they’ve just been holding out on us all this time.
Of course, if you’re going to have a potluck section, you should also have one for leftovers. Go down to the end of the aisle, hang a right at the pasty-looking guy with no shirt and a trucker’s tan, cooking dogs and burgers on a decrepit propane grill (we’re striving for authenticity here, after all). It’s past the endcap with all the paper plates, plastic cups, and flatware.
Leftovers will look, at first glance, like part of an appliance store, since you can’t very well put all those leftovers in conventional cases with glass doors. No, only refrigerators like the ones you and I have in our kitchens will do. This has to be homelike, remember. So you’ll walk down the tiled expanse, flanked by two long rows of refrigerators and freezers. All different kinds, some with ice makers, some with magnets and drawings and report cards hanging on them, some in white, some in avocado or marigold.
They’d be crammed with Tupperware, used Cool Whip containers, Ziploc bags, and Saran-Wrapped bowls, all filled with the stuff nobody could finish. You’d get a discount in the freezer section for all of the mysterious, foil-wrapped cubes that’ve been there for ages since nobody’s quite sure what’s in them. And what’s an authentic, home-style fridge without open milk containers, complete with lipstick stains, and at least one bowl that time has forgotten, with a robust ecosystem just under the plastic wrap?
On second thought, maybe this isn’t a good idea after all.
Tags: Food, home cooking, leftovers, supermarkets