Chowhound is a weekly column about what’s trending in Detroit food culture. Tips: [email protected].
As someone who’s shopped for foodstuffs almost daily over the last 30-plus years, I’ve seen a lot of life play out in grocery stores, and I’ve learned from it. People are as human picking up a few things from the market as they are in general: smart-assed, sneaky, and, sometimes, really struggling. Here are three true tales in context that taught me something:
Avoid appearing desperate: Toilet paper teaches us all lessons at some point. Typically, this happens after we leave home and our parents stop stockpiling it for us. I can’t tell you how many times I came up empty in college after a good sit, or how, just as often, I left empty rolls hanging for roommates. What I will share is the parable of the last time I waited until last-minute to take care of such business.
Feeling a need and out of wipe, I made a late-night run to the corner grocery store. Time felt precious. I speed-walked in, grabbed a family pack, and got myself quickly to check-out. Nothing was automated in those days, and — Murphy’s Law — I found myself facing the tail end of the last checkout line left open that evening. A thought of using the store’s men’s room crossed my mind. “Hold on. You can make it,” I told myself, my mind sending me an altogether different message than the emergency Morse code of my twitching sphincter. I was seriously starting to sweat. Then, I heard the words I’ll never forget, which came just over my shoulder from the lips of a lady who turned out to be my gastrointestinal guarding angel:
“I’m opening up here, folks,” she announced from the next register, before pointing and calling me out from among the others, standing there with my single, toiletry item. “Sir, I’ll take you first, given what you’ve got.” I like to think she meant just that one thing, not that specific one thing. Whatever the case, the guy ahead of me in line looked back and laughed. “He’s obviously in a hurry,” his girl giggled, which got everyone going at my expense. To this day, I can’t say with any certainty that my checkout angel was trying to be funny, though things certainly worked out that way. Perception’s reality. In the decades since that experience, I’ve made it my practice to never be seen again just buying toilet paper. Who needs that crap?
And it’s all about where you stand when the shit hits the fan: Farts in public are funny unless the finger-pointing gets directed at you. That truth slapped me in the face in the frozen food aisle of an Albertson’s out West once, ten seconds into laughing my ass off over someone else’s gassy misfortunes. I had just turned into that aisle to find myself a few paces behind an elderly woman. Aside from crinkle cut fries and Mrs. T’s pierogi, frozen foods have little appeal to me. Intent on breezing by, I found myself fast on her heels, looking to pass. Unaware of me there, she let a first fart rip that startled and stopped me short of pulling alongside. More farts followed in rapid succession; machine gun-style. Suddenly under fire, I, too, froze; losing it with all the giddy glee that comes over us when someone else busts ass uncontrollably in our presence. But then the stink bomb hit. It was bad: sweet & sour sulfur scrambled eggs and then some. Hanging heavy in the air there, I hung with it, standing still and waiting until Ms. Mustard Gas made her way to the end of the aisle then disappeared. Two seconds later, after I’d braved a few steps forward, a long, hard “Ewwwww!” erupted behind me, followed by a loud “So gross!”
In hindsight, I should have kept moving and not turned around, but that’s not what happened. Instead, I stopped dead again, looked back, and made eye contact with two young women making faces at me like I was the one to blame for the horrible, olfactory assault they’d just been subjected to. With the real culprit escaped around a corner, all they saw standing there in that criminal stench was me. I instantly knew there was no use trying to plead my case. With nobody else in sight, there was no other person to point at plausibly and pass their sniff test. In an instant, I went from cracking up over flatulence in others to feeling the withering shame one’s subjected to being accused of the same by fellow farters. And it let me see human nature as it relates to gas-passing from a slightly singed yet somehow priceless, third-party perspective: it’s one hilarious hypocrisy we all practice without apology.
Sometimes, we just don’t know what else to do: Walking into a grocery store once, I had to walk around an old beater of a car idling loudly outside the front door. Inside it, a female driver had two babies in back, neither in child safety seats. As I passed in front of the car, a man with his arms full of packs of diapers and powdered baby formula ran out, threw the goods in the car, and jumped in. It sputtered away with its muffler rattling. Steve, the store manager I knew as a great, hard-working guy, ran out a second or two afterward.
“Did you see that?” I asked him, already starting to tear-up.
“Did you get a plate number?” he answered me with his own question. I told him I didn’t. I’ll never forget that desperate couple. I remember them whenever I’m in a grocery store that keeps its baby formula under lock and key these days, along with indulgences like tobacco products and high-priced bottles of booze. It keeps me mindful that, as people, we do the wrong things for all kinds of reasons, and it reminds me that I’m not fit to be anyone’s judge. Amen.
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