Eating Raoul.

Cookie has become food-obsessed in this time of shrinking food selection.  It keeps me up at night.  And it keeps me from eating, and not in a good way.

Baltimore is a horrible region for supermarkets compared to Columbus.  Columbus is a traditional test market city and a variety of stores, and the bounty was always better stocked, with more variety than you could shake a stick at.   Compared to Columbus, Baltimore is a food desert even under the best of circumstances. 

Part of the reason is that the number one chain, Giant Food is so horribly run.  We have three Wegmans, which are nice, but all are half an hour away.  There is Shop Rite, which was on life support, before, then there are the boutique markets.  Add in a smattering of Safeways, and that's about all we have.  We have no Kroger, we have no Giant Eagle, we have no Publix.  There are a couple Harris Teeter, but not many.   And there is no Piggly to get Wiggly about.

And then there is the Trader Joes with the mile-long lines.  A neighbor said that her husband trudged out to one, had been standing in line for an hour, when a woman in a battered Chevy Cavalier filled with trash drove by and start screaming at people to take off their masks, which was a sign of the devil, and repent to be saved by the blood of Jesus.  "So now I go to Trader Joes because he is over the experience."

We all have to be flexible, because we are all in this together, right?

So we have food.  But it's not the food we want.  It's the food we can find.  We no longer live in a nation where we have enjoyed the unlimited freedom of choice at the stores.  We are careening toward a world where hardtack biscuits will be gourmet.   So I look at what we have, and I think, can we afford to eat that can of corned beef hash?  Do I dare open that jar of jelly?  What if we need it - I mean really need it in a month or six?

What we can get at the stores around us is either stuff that you cannot live on, or stuff that no one else wants.

The food crisis started the day after White House addressed.  THEN the hoarding started because people heard him and thought "He's going to kill us all."

So know when you go to the store you see not what you want to find, but what others will not eat.  Campbell's soups are wiped out.  No tomato, no tomato with rice, no "tomato and stars".  In uniform fashion, the only Campbell's soups that one can find are the unloved ones.  Split pea, cream of celery, cream of chicken, cream of cheddar cheese, and bean with bacon.

Pasta sauce?  It all Vodka Sauce, Four Cheese, Meat Flavored, and Ricotta.  Pasta?  Good luck with that.  The Hershey brands of pasta (San Giorio, Creamette, Muellers) no longer exist.  Everything is Barilla, and even then its either just spaghetti or elbow macaroni. 

Even in produce, the potatoes look like they have been stored way too long.

And then, Cookie had an idea. "Let's try that store over by the you know what.  Yeah, the one that never has anyone in it."

It's an off-brand store, way off-brand.  But we trudged over looking for something, hoping they had it. 

They didn't, but oh the bounty we found!

Campbell's tomato soup!  Low sodium, but I can work with that.  Paper towels!  Oh thank god!  Name brand toilet paper!  Hosannah!  Prego!  We bought one each!  And they had Raoul's salsa!

The husband wanted to tell our neighbor, but I stopped him!  "You fool!  They'll know where to go and they'll take my precious away from us."

And I came to.

Tell them.  Ugh.

So today I will eat something for lunch. In celebration of yesterday's finds.  Then I will return to looking at trees and wondering if we'll wondering how to eat a maple, at the bushes wondering if push comes to shove how to cook and azalea. 

How long this social distancing thing will last is unknown.  But I continue to fret about starving.  About that point when things get really dire, I'll break open Raoul's salsa and some long stale chips, knowing that tomorrow there will be mud pies.