Lost in the Supermarket
Friday, April 4th, 2008
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? (more…)