My condo building is near four grocery stores: Metro Mart, Gold’s Pick ‘n Save, Whole Foods, and by far the smallest and most neighborly of the quartet, Koppa’s on Farwell, where I shop most often. Their selections are limited, but now that my doctor has decreed I can’t eat anything that has a face or a mother, I find myself heading for big box spaces where vegan runneth over.
OK, so today I loaded up with soy milk, frozen veggies and frozen fruits to use in the soy milkshakes that start my day. This week I’ve been eating 15-bean soup that I disguised with spinach and tofu chunks, though why anyone would seek out tofu is beyond me. In the 1940s cartoonist and social critic, Al Capp, devised a character he titled the “Shmoo.” Fried, it tasted like chicken. Boiled, like ham. The critter had the ability to please the masses, and its whiskers made great toothpicks. Come to think of it, the Shmoo was an early form of tofu. If you sawed it lengthwise, it made great building material.
At the Whole Foods checkout counter I noticed a flier promoting the store’s sponsorship of a salad bar at select Milwaukee Public Schools, the idea being that a big bowl of greens is good for kids, or at least it’s better than vending machines hooking them on sugary snacks. The checker asked if I’d like to donate to the cause, part of the Omaha-based (my birthplace) food giant’s goal to place 300 salad bars in schools across the U.S. To clarify: These are actual bars with utensils and such for dispensing salads.
I say nay to this idea.
Having just navigated the Whole Foods trail of stuff, I chewed on the recent news that Milwaukee is No. 4 in the “poorest” cities in the United States, the remnants of a once great Detroit checked in at No. 1, with Cleveland and Buffalo taking the other dismal rust belt slots. Gone are their bases of industry, and in its place is poverty, itself a kind of substitute “industry.” It’s alleged that four out of 10 Milwaukee kids exist at the poverty level.
The more I consider the shameless marketing ploy at Whole Foods, the angrier I become. There is no way in hell that these mega stores could possibly sell the tsunami of foodstuffs inside their vast emporiums, and well, where does it go at the end of the day, the week, the month? Down the drain? In the dumpster? It’s terrible enough that MPS is in such deep doo-doo, but glossing it over with a gleaming salad bar dispensing rabbit food, strikes me as a band-aid made of greens. Is the world’s largest provider/distributor of food really socially conscious?
As a young mother in the early ’60s, I lived with my intern husband in a dismal flat in Highland Park, a crumbling area (even then) of Detroit. In order to survive, my spouse brought sandwiches home from the hospital cafeteria, and I worked for $2 per hour at a Chevrolet dealership. A young black girl, perhaps 15 years old, rode a bus from the ghetto where she lived, so she could earn $.50 per hour babysitting my toddler.
Her name was Emma. I always knew my life would improve because I was white, educated and upwardly mobile. I wonder what happened to the dreams of Emma in Detroit?
