Supermarket Sweep

Does any one else remember that gameshow from the eighties called Supermarket Sweep, where the object of the game was to answer questions correctly about the price of household goods in order to win a chance at running pell-mell (pelmel? pel mel? Whatever!) through a market grabbing all the food and health and beauty products you could fit into the shopping cart in under sixty seconds?

Well, I was thinking of that game today as I wandered, at a much slower, rather anemically amoebic pace, vaguely nauseated--perhaps by the flourescent glare of the lighting reflecting off of all that shiny, brightly colored plastic packaging--through aisles and aisles of consumer condiment cornucopia.

In fact, I probably looked like a druggie, with the glazed eyes and the aimless wandering up and down the same aisles, feeling as pathetically urged to move continuously as those poor souls in the first level of Dante's purgatory, eternally windswept, and I think, bitten intermittenly by wasps.

Why am I telling you this story? I don't know, exactly.

But I do know that when you've been so hungry for so long (I'm talking weeks here) that the sight of all that food in one place makes you want to literally vomit. It doesn't even look remotely appealing. And somewhere in the back of all that fuzzy vagal symptomology, your brain is going "Psst! Jamie! You're really hungry! Eat some food! Come on! Your parasympathetic nervous system can only hold out so long!"

Any way, you avoid the condiment aisle all together, because it's been so long since you could afford food, let alone "artificial products to make food taste better" that you can't remember whether or not you'd like that particular brand of ketchup or not, and why the hell do we really need to choose between seven brands of ketchup any way? Doesn't it all taste the same? (I'll give you a hint: it does if you're poor, because you can't afford it.) Couldn't we fund cancer research with the money saved from eschewing redundant condiments from the American market altogether and funneling the money to worthwhile research?

So then I went down the frozen food aisle and stared at all the frozen meals I ate as a student, and continue to eat as an unemployed bum. And I thought, "Three dollars?! Who has three dollars for 8 ounces of frozen food?!"

Nothing looked remotely tempting.

I debated momentarily over the idea of just buying soda, and going home, but figured I would end up in hypoglycemic crisis if I did so, and therefore forced myself to purchase some chicken and potato salad, which then made me spiral into a free-association-thought about how poor people have to eat lots of potatos, because they're cheap, and how high-starch foods like potatos help type II diabetes along, and how very, very, very rich pharmaceutical companies and hospitals are getting because of all the type II diabetics in this country, and wasn't there some kind of evil coincidence about it all?

I've turned into Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. And what's more, I even have tin foil around here, to create a barrier between my brain and that of the FBI!

I think first I have to work on my "persecuted minority" speech, though. You know, brush it up a little bit and make it sound a little more convincing. Then I'll be able to take on the world, one condiment at a time...