DESPITE ALL MY MY RAGE I AM STILL JUST A SALT FIEND, IN A RAGE.
Hello One, Hello All:
Just returned from a particularly bewildering—excuse me—EXCRUCIATINGLY REVEALING trip to my associates at The Associated (food mart).
Sent on the noble quest of retrieving a bottle of bleach for my Mim, I set upon retrieving a bottle of hearts of palm, for well, myself.
EMPTY SHELVES!!! HORRORS! The elusive and supple inner-tree meat NOWHERE TO BE FOUND!
I scanned the canned food section up, I scanned it down. I peered wearily at my fellow shoppers. Turrential rains had sent me to the low-end supermarche, the one next to the old people’s home and the sandy pub so flavorfully dubbed “TJ Brines”.
This branch of Associated Inc. is thimble sized, but the customers aren’t. This makes their in-store movements similar to fitting a balloon through a napkin ring: both terribly unlikely images.
No one seemed aware that a most important subdivision of the salt pyramid was missing, absent, unaccounted for! They were all too busy with their BREYERS ICE-CREAM COUPONS and seeing what was on “special.”
I gave a couple pedestrian shoppers the evil-eye. To be satisfied with cookies is one thing, to live a life with salt tis far, far better thing. Effervescent, cultivated, ranging in colors from black to pink, salt is my carb, my sugar, my brewski. (It also, it should be noted prevents goiters. BONUS POINT!)
My favorite foods are from the ocean, the sea’s floor, culled from a rock’s face, caught with worm and/or by hook. But my prime above ground minister would have to be Hearts of Palm. And now he had vanished, as if by crook…
I first discovered this delicacy on a flight to Lisbon in the 4th grade. Perched elegantly atop a single leaf of lettuce inside a small plastic container it lay: grace confounded with such exquisite taste! I knew it must be mine… And soon everyone 3 rows up and in back knew as well.
Perhaps it was the recession? I assented bleakly. Often called “millionaire’s salad” perhaps it had become inappropriate to stock such savory fare. Resilient and boring cans of CORN PELLETS sagged like ancient bookends on my sinking heart. What was a girl to do?
In hot pursuit I huffed about the store a couple more times, while the simpletons knocked over entire orange pyramids with their girth. (Salt is said to make you retain water weight, which is why some dopey mostly female food eaters warn against it. But I have found no such evidence. Except for when I went off the pill and dropped some lbs; apparently I had been hauling around an entire bucket of water … but that’s a different story.)
So here I stood, in a supermarket trompsed by those who arrive in their own shopping cart. A dark cloud descended upon this already dark and cloudy excuse for a food emporium.
If only I could get to a rainforest or something… Machetes?
Grumblings of palm tree over-cultivation have been audible for some time now, especially to me, what with my ears that pop like a boom-mike on any matter of SALT+FOOD.
I re-deduced: basically pickled and in a jar. I circled back to the correct isle and shelf. The desolate still life glared its vacancy sign at me—the possible aftershock of a new environmental legislation?? Taunted with throwbacks to prohibition I mustered up images of salt outlaws and veered for the checkout, bleach bottle trembling in hand.
So what was the story behind this grim reproduction of a pauper’s life??? Had the avatars put an end to chopping tropicalia’s most emblematic tree?! No one in this wasteland, this PROVISION DEPOT would have any answers, at least I knew that was true.
Until my next fix,
Yours truly,
UmamiGirl