"Um,
I don't know," said the woman. She stood in front of the glass
pressing her fingers onto it, leaving greasy finger prints all over
the deli case. "I just can't decide."
“Mmm-hmm,” I said.
“They all look so good,” she said.
She was obese, and a lot of the customers are. Over fifty-percent of the people who come in are gigantic, and what they buy in the cafe are things like brownies with chocolate chips, a layer of peanut butter and and inch thick layer of compressed frosting. These things don't sell better than the other things in the dessert case, they sell better than food.
While someone is being indecisive it's futile to suggest something or to ask what exactly what they're in the mood for, for the simple sake that most people are indecisive for the sole purpose of being the center of attention. They spend most of their day unnoticed, not being babied, and often ordering something at a cafe to be nurtured: first by the person at the case and then again as serotonin splashes out in response to the cinnamon roll frosted with a batter so saturated with sugar that I can see individual granules. When I'm in a good mood, I play along, and say something like, 'Well, you look like you might need a piece of cheesecake, what do you think.” Invariably, the person tells me that cheesecake isn't the right thing, and so I'll suggest something else, and we'll go around in circles until she chooses something from an area where she wasn't even looking, making a body gesture and pushing away the air with her hand that is the manner of people when they have given up because their task is just too daunting. In this way, picking out an eleven AM dessert is similar to building an airplane that travels the speed of light in a vacuum in order to board it and, just at the moment that the plane reaches the most impossible of speed thresholds, unlatch your safety belt to run to the bathroom at the front of the fuselage so that you can break the light-speed barrier.
Other
times, as with this woman whose body language reads to me as
annoyingly self-important, (I'm not a very good person, but customer service has nothing to do with being a good person. For example, a woman whom I know to be diabetic comes in every day. The other day, she bought an enormous, frosting globbed cinnamon roll. I sold it to her. Had I been a good person, I would have reminded her that this wasn't a good idea, reminded her of necrotic digits and told her a story about my great uncle who has dementia, sometimes forgets where he's at while driving down the street in the town he grew up in [yes, my family still lets him drive] and panics because he didn't keep close attention of his diabetes and now has microscopic strokes that render more and more of his brain useless, basically the same thing that happens to a diabetic's digits, but I didn't tell this woman ordering a cinnamon roll any of that. I let her order the roll and I smiled at her while she did it, because customer service has nothing to do with being a good person and in fact you have to sometimes be a shitty person, and being a shitty person, sometimes you grow tired of the behavior on the other side of the case, which is often shittier behavior than your own) I have a hard time playing along and am
silent while she hems and haws. But I can only stand on the business
side of a dessert case for so long before my silence gets awkward,
even for myself. I said to her, “This apple pie was made in-house
just this morning.”
To which she said, “Is there anything weird about it?”
Anything weird
about it?
When I was working in a bakery in Seattle, a new girl was hired and it was my job to train her. At five in the morning, she came in, small like a pixy, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She had tattooed sleeves on both of her arms and in spite of that she seemed, in manner and build, like she could have been running around on a sixth grade playground at recess as much as working in a bakery. The first day that I worked with her I showed her how to do the bake-off, cook omelets, handle the rushes, etcetera, and by the second day I could tell that she was bored so I let her play while we were slow. She found the flour, the butter, some apples and some cheddar cheese and she made some individually sized apple pies, placing a layer of cheddar under the top crust. For a moment, I couldn't imagine why she would do this (she pinched edges while talking about her mother teaching her how to bake, how she loved baking, dreamed of being a baker... eventually talking about how it was the new trend to put colby cheese or sharp cheddar in with apple pie).
And then I remembered my grandfather. Nobody loved pie as much as my grandfather, and because of that fact my grandmother more often than not had a pie on the kitchen table for him. My grandfather used to take a slice of apple pie, cut a big chunk of cheddar to stick on top, then warm them together in the oven until the cheddar melted down the sides. My grandfather, God rest his soul, is the oldest person I have ever met, and the oldest person I will ever have met. And so if he was combining the flavor of apple pie with that of cheddar, it's been going on far too long for it to be weird.
But I had put cheddar slices under the top crust of that apple pie precisely because it was to be weird. I work in a place where, when I schmeared hummus and placed slices of cucumber on take-home bagel sandwiches, a regular customer came in the next day, having seen the sandwiches, to tell one of my coworkers how ridiculous it is to put hummus and cucumber on a bagel sandwich. Meat, egg and cheese should be the only things that we put on our bagel sandwiches. But the truth of the matter is, hummus was the first schmear schmeared on the first bagel when the bagel was invented, and when the bagel seemed a bit dry on a hot day, the inventor of the bagel placed slices of cucumber on it to make it refreshing. It's not ridiculous for someone to put hummus and cucumber on a sandwich, it's ridiculous to think that it's in any way out of the ordinary to do so.
Another time, I made hollandaise sauce, roasted tomatoes and asparagus, combined the ingredients with eggs and put it on rye bread for an eggs benedict sandwich. Customer quote: “Looks like someone took the 'salad' part of egg salad too literally.”
When the woman asked if there was anything weird about the apple pie, I said yes.
She said, “I'm glad you told me that. That prevents me from buying it. Umm... I'll just take a piece of that cake.” (The cake that she bought was a Jello cake. We buy them daily from the same place we buy the cinnamon rolls and the frosting and peanut butter layered brownies, along with a lot of other things. Interestingly, they call it a Jello cake because it really is made with Jello, and you can see the neon strips of it throughout the cake. The Jello is supposed to make the cake moister, to which I say, if you make a cake properly, shouldn't it already be moist enough? The cake sags under its own weight.)
I work in a place where the desserts are so sweet that when I taste them, I only taste the flavor of the dessert for a split moment before they become overwhelmingly sweet and my tongue goes into shock. Yes, I feel the granules of sugar between my teeth. I have an urge to take something and scrape them off. Every time I add whipped cream to someone's 'Teddy Bear Mocha', I think about the fact that I'm adding, at a conservative minimum, 300 calories to their drink at the space of only the top ½ inch of their cup. This is the nutritional information of some frozen omelettes that we sell:
These are real. I've never seen a piece of food that listed such a high percentage of your daily value of anything besides vitamin C or B12. On Wednesday, a cardiologist bought four of them.
Those bagel sandwiches that I mentioned above, they usually have 1-2 omelettes along with a meat (roast beef, ham, bacon, turkey or corned beef) and a slice of cheese (cheddar, Swiss, provolone, mozzarella or American) on them.
I came from a land where pixy girls with tattooed arms giggled at how naughty they were being for putting finely diced bacon into doughnuts, and arrived in a land where lumbering giants eat 60 pounds of bacon before Matt Lauer has greeted America.
(Bacon grease at 8:30 in the morning.)
It's weird that people would rather eat one of those omelettes instead of fresh vegetables. (I have grown to be just as repulsed at adults who make yukky faces at vegetables [or adults who make yukky faces, generally] as those adults are of those fresh vegetables.) It's weird that someone will look at a trough among many on a steam bar, see the bacon grease pooled at the bottom, and then use a pair of tongs to fish out five or six sticks. It's weird that science can study food, how we should eat food, and then come out with a simple to follow chart on how to eat, such as a food pyramid, and it will be so unsuccessful that they have to abandon the pyramid altogether and just adopt different portions. It's weird that we can have one food, beef, that is the largest cause of water pollution, the largest cause of topsoil deforestation, a larger cause of green house gas emissions than cars, and do nothing about it. Less than nothing. If we just switched a cow's diet off of corn and back to grass, the greenhouse gas emissions would be negligible and the average consumer of the meat would lose almost six pounds a year. Making our diet smaller rather than more diverse is weird. Not eating something called a cup-cake for breakfast, but eating a cup-cake without frosting and calling it a muffin is weird. Getting skim milk in your cafe latte, then having 350 calories added to it with a fortress of whipped cream... and on and on.
What I'm saying is more of a question than a statement. For centuries, food sustained us, made our cities and population grow, came from earth and returned to it. When was it that it got so weird?
