Just Thinking About A Few Things

From The Amazing Insights of a man called “John”

OBSERVATIONS AND OPINIONS

Now for the next few minutes I am going to take some time to express observations I have made, opinions I cherish and some other various flickerings of the mind that I think some people might be interested in reading.

It gripes my ass to go to a grocery store that advertises, “To Save You Money” and then blatantly places a 6-ounce New York Strip steak on display in a refrigerated meat case with a price tag on it of Twenty-Two Dollars and some odd cents.

That would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that I can remember, not too awfully long ago, when that same steak would have been priced at $6.50 — and I am old enough to remember when really decent hamburger (without any saline solution injected in it to make it weigh more on the scales) cost just One dollar for Three pounds.

Even so, nowadays, I am forced literally forced by my over-cautionary and somewhat mistrusting suspicious nature, to inspect the bottom of the steak laying so neatly in that plastic package with the cellophane wrapped around it —(Once i get it home, of course…. I would never do this in the store itself …) — and what I am looking for is that familiar old brownish tinge to the meat that tells me it is more than old enough to have been scrapped instead of having been put out for sale to the trusting but somewhat scatterbrained customer base that flocks through the doors of these places expecting that the stores actually care about them when, in fact, the concern of the stores is their own bottom and, despite all advertising to the contrary, are not the least bit interested in providing fresh, delicious, affordable offerings to their clientele.

I am not even remotely suggesting that all supermarkets and grocery vendors are shysters or that all of them would determinedly present inferior merchandise to their unsuspecting customer base…. no, not all of them for sure ..but I have run into a few of the ones who do and no matter who complains or how much they complain, nothing ever changes.

I went to one of the Freshness stores just yesterday and purchased a bunch of pretty red radishes from their produce stand. The red radishes looked great.. round and plump and all their greenery attached and looking good under the continuous water spray emanating from a hidden pipe overhead. I got six radishes for about $2.49 and went home with my cash out receipt that told me, “you have saved $40 cents today.” (Bull Shit of course. I do not believe that any store ever loses a dime on stuff they sell — maybe they do, I do not really know… but enough of them have pissed me off enough that by now I am hard pressed to trust every place that i go into to buy stuff.

I washed my radishes and dried them off a little and sat down with a little saucer with some of them on it and picked one up. Instantly I noticed that the radish felt rather hard …with a really tough, nearly impenetrable rind …and I could not chew the radish the way I picked up so I took a knife and sliced a few thin slivers with the knife. The slivers I cut were very tough to chew — not at all like the radishes I remembered from when I was a kid and grew my own in a small garden plat next to the hog pen at our country home.

Back then, radishes were fresh, fragrant and a delight to pop into the mouth and relish the somewhat crunchy texture and the bite of the vegetable’s essential oils against my tongue. Now those were radishes… fresh, pure, clean and delicious. And all they cost me was a few cents for a packet of seeds and a little labor raking and pruning and caring for the little buggers as they grew to maturity.

Not so long ago, I went to another store and looked at a piece of pork, again neatly wrapped – and I noticed some small round dots of green color on the surface of the meat. The red lights over the meat case were unable to hide this defect …mold (mold) or how the hell ever you spell it.

I hailed a clerk and showed him the meat and asked, “Are you going to charge me extra for this mold on this meat?”

He took it from my hands and as I was walking down the aisle away from him a little distance, I looked back over my shoulder just in time to see him putting the meat back into the counter for sale to the next person who came along.

That same day I observed some fat slob of a man at the donut case. He was grabbing a donut with his bare hands out of the display case (Instead of using the provided wax paper squares designed to be used to handle the donuts). He then looked at the donut, smelled it close to his nose and then stuck it back into the display again for someone else to buy.

I have also observed some people actually eating straight out of open salad bars or soup tureens, dipping their forks or their spoons into the openly displayed salad or soup over and over again until somebody came by and made them quit doing it. (I have also never seen a salad display or a soup tureen thus handled being replaced by a fresh one either.

And then there are the ripe red tomatoes that look great until you cut into one of them and discover that the entire inside of the tomato is black as midnight from some kind of rot. I often wonder, “How do they do that?”

But a person has to eat and so I go to super markets to shop. I am just learning to be more careful in watching what I am buying because I am not in the mood for a case of some kind of food poisoning or worse.