I’m perpetually trying new things while camping. I’d gotten into a groove of eating Mountain House freeze dried food when I’d been canoeing into the Canadian outback. Now that I’m “backpacking by Dodge” weight savings are irrelevant. The freeze dried “groove” might be a “rut”? So I ignored my MREs and freeze dried wonderpacks. I stopped at a grocery store for basic human food.
I’ve always loved grocery stores. Don’t get me wrong, I hate shopping. It’s just that grocery stores are miracles of capitalist plenty. Even as a kid I was astounded buy the wonder and glory of any decent American grocery store. Colorful fruits and fresh veggies and miles of stocked shelves! I never took such wealth and abundance for granted. Now, as things fade, others are seeing what they’d never noticed.
Grocery stores decline along with everything else. I braced myself. There would be shortages. Nothing makes me feel sadder than empty shelves. I see the leering skeletal face of a far distant future death. I lived most of my life without empty shelves. I expected capitalist bounty to last the rest of my life. I was incorrect. The post-Covid Bidenverse of inevitable deliberate self-inflicted collapse is a much attenuated signal (we are not the much battered Soviets of 1980) but “I could never happen here” is no longer a true statement. I would see an empty shelf or two or ten and that would bum me out. I tromped into the store with head hung low.
What a shock! The place was fully stocked; just like the “before times”! I picked from among a dozen varieties of tomato. I grabbed exactly the canned goods I wanted. How silly I’d been. Despair is a sin. All is not lost, all is never lost.
I planned to cook beans and bratwurst. Full sized bean cans are too big for my little iron frying pan. Amid two dozen kinds of beans I found small cans with pop tops. Awesome!
After I checked out I realized I’d paid $1.33 for small cans when a big can was $0.99. Dumb! Also I didn’t find any Jiffy Pop popcorn. Jiffy Pop popcorn is pre-packed in a disposable tinfoil frying pan specifically designed to be cooked over an open fire. They’re silly but taste delicious. Harmless fun that reminds me of my youth.
I have a little plastic box full of “camping” canned goods. I take the box on every trip now. My idea is to have the box stocked with MORE than I’ll ever need. Should I go on a trip on short notice, there will be enough in there even if I don’t do any planning at all. At camp I’ll root around in the box and always find something to eat. I planned to stash a couple Jiffy Pops in the box. Maybe next time.
My box of food is more like a bug out box than an “I’m going camping on a normal weekend” box. Why not? In times of inflation it’s never a bad idea to buy canned food.
I paid at the robot checkout. They used to be buggy, but now they work flawlessly. Remember when people were bitching about “mandatory living wage” for entry level jobs? I think that was towards the end of the Obama regime. The checkout robot never calls in sick or goes on a woke political fit. It shaved the bottom off the workforce. Inflation did the rest. I don’t know if the $15 minimum wage law was passed in this or that State. I just know that nobody mentions it anymore. Robots and math; they fix a lot of things without even getting noticed.
(To be continued.)