Thursday, December 4, 2008

Of expired snicky-snacks and not-so-hungry hogs.

Much of my pre-Peace Corps days – when not reading up on Zambia or writers’ groups – are spent in an organic discount odds-and-ends shop known as Deals and Steals. A cult favorite among Northamponites, Deals and Steals provides the liberal masses with their wheat germ, Terra Chips, and coconut milk without breaking too much into the college-student/NGO-slave laborer piggy bank.

Our clientele ranges from the super-green young professionals; the lunch-snack-hording mommies; the mac-and-cheese consuming hippie/hipster artists; and the plain 99-cent-max-purchase town destitute. So how is this wonderful store able to provide such deep discounts on bulk granola, Fair Trade chocolate and organic olive oil, you ask? Some products make it to our shop on Pearl Street from the wreckages of small businesses now folded. Others are overstock or damages from the big box health stores – Trader Joes, Whole Foods. Still more are items that have been discontinued. Stock up on your shitake mushroom pad thai now because you’ll never be seeing that again. Most, though, of our items are simply out-of-code, especially the .99 cent collection of chips, cereals, cookies, crackers and bars that line the Bargain Wall. Still taste good, perhaps a bit on the hard side approaching June or July. Just old. Expired. Past their prime.

So I spend most of my days looking at dates. Yes, I am paid a meager sum per hour to do what my Grandmother has turned into an obsessive-compulsive neurosis – check expiration codes. Old items get one price based on how far past the good date they are, and in-date items get another. Really old items get placed in donation bins that get picked through weekly by Food Not Bombs or eaten by hungry health-food-lovin’ employees. (No names here.)

You learn two things working in Deals and Steals. One – that time is a continuously moving evil force of nature. Two – that the act of filling America’s pantries and tables has spawned a vicious culture of all its own.

First, time. As I said before, I spend most of my days battling dates. In-date things on the shelf go out of date. Prices need to be changed. Out-of-date things go too far out of date. Products need to be pulled and thrown into donation bins. Incoming products need to be pulled out of (excess) packaging and evaluated. How long ago was August? June? March? Wasn’t summer just around the corner? Is July really five months dead? Is it December 4 today? Surely you’re wrong? I just put those cookies up a week ago. They can’t be bad yet.

Dates have become my constant reminder of Africa. So long has passed since graduation, since summer, since fall. I calculate these months on my fingers and the memories seem like yesterday. But the food is already bad. Those lucky in-date few transport me to where I will be when they make their migration to the Bargain Wall. Mar 13 09 – what then? A recent email from the Peace Corps, bumping my departure date up to February 17, hasn’t helped the expiration contemplation.

Time is relentless. Constantly the food is going stale. Quicker than we can eat it. We are selling it for ninety-nine cents, buy one get one free and still it will go bad. It will wind up in the donation bins in the back and when it goes quite old, it will be taken by a local farmer to feed his pigs. We are a small store, barely bigger than my bedroom thrice-over, and still we have need of a pig. To eat the food we cannot stomach ourselves.

This segues me to Deals and Steals insight number two. The American way of procuring food is twisted, over-indulgent, and wasteful. Okay, this is not a blog to rave about one pseudo-liberal’s aversion to modern society. That would be slightly hypocritical as I now sit in a warm coffee shop on an iBook with a tummy-full of expensive caffeine and undoubtedly imported trail-mix.

Still, my close encounter with the grocery system has been harrowing. There is a whole food-marketing-industrial complex dedicated to providing us with as many foodstuffs as we can desire. All wrapped and delivered in elaborate packages, further packaged in excessive cardboard, then shrink-wrapped into pallets, placed on trucks and shipped across the country. Before that, they probably began on a ship, before that a factory, before that a field (or worse a laboratory) in a land far far away.

I see only the food that is rejected by other, more legitimate stores. How much do they discard of? And what of the stores with no Deals and Steals nearby, no willing purchaser for their broken boxes or expiring crates? Consumers pay for perfect. Waste is but fundamental counterpoint to the chock-full Stop-and-Shop’s we have all come to love.

Such revelations are particularly hard when viewed next to Zambia. As one of the more stable countries in the region, there is a tendency to think that the problems that wrack, say, Zimbabwe don't apply there. Still, recent articles in the Times of Zambia and AllAfrica.com mention food shortages, rising mealie meal (a dietary staple) prices and slight political unrest. The government has taken action but they are predicting food shortages to hit a low this winter. “The country will run out of maize at the end of February 2009 and that there will be need to import the shortfall to last until May 2009 when we would rely on our own produce," said Agriculture and Commodities Minister Brian Chituwo.

According to the Times, people are cutting back on unexpected visits because everyone knows food is scarce. Importation is unusual and there are worries that the prices will increase beyond what the lower class is capable of paying. The government has sought to quell fears and denies the shortage is a national disaster.

Think of it. The need to import food being considered a potential national disaster. The United States is quite the agricultural powerhouse but I cannot imagine running out of food, or needing to calculate the exact time when the current supplies will run out in relation to the next harvest. Like food doesn’t always appear in elaborate packages, from cardboard boxes, from shrink-wrapped pallets, from 18-wheelers, from cargo ships, from lands far far away.

Working in Deals and Steals, it is hard to picture the culture that I am moving rapidly towards, faster than the crackers going stale on the shelves. It is strange in my little role in the food-industrial complex to imagine an existence so tied to the land. It is difficult to think of the New England pig growing fat on the perfect-good food that Americans just couldn’t eat in its two-odd-year shelf life. It is unfathomable to contemplate starvation. Perhaps I am being ethnocentric, but the words food shortage and Africa still conjures up images of starvation and famine. Zambia will never take on the crisis situation of Malawi or Ethiopia. I know this. I also know I am not ready to see someone starve. I hope to never be ready for that.

Not while our Massachusetts swine are still getting fat.