Earlier this week, I found myself at the local Fresh Market. (Disclaimer: I do not often look for myself at the local Fresh Market, because the chances that I would be there are very small.) But I was there for a reason. Let me explain.
(Disclaimer: Unlike most stories about me behaving atypically, this story does not begin with, “So, there was this girl…”.)
I am not a connoisseur of fresh, healthy food, as you can probably tell from my dining habits. But every so often I get a hankering (more than a yen, less than a yearning.) for a band sub. When I was a kid, back when Sleestak ruled the earth, my high school band used to sell submarines one Saturday a month, to raise funds to buy band things like ocarinas and sousaphones (as opposed to banned things like Cuban cigars and carved ivory ocarinas and sousaphones). The band came around the week before and took orders, and the subs were delivered Saturday morning.
Band subs were the greatest sandwiches in the world. Cold cuts and lettuce and tomato and onions and Italian dressing. They arrived just before lunch time, infused with flavor (from the French infuse “to sit in the back of a 1978 AMC
Gremlin since 4AM until the Italian dressing soaked into the bread”).
So the other day I had a hankering for a band sub. Having no high school band handy, I went off in search of ingredients.
The hardest ingredient to find is the tomato. Tomatoes are almost extinct, having been crowded out of their habitat by some kind of crunchy red things that ship well. These tomatoids creep into tomato nests at night and eat their young. The proper, or “squooshy” tomato, survives only in hidden tomato preserves. (Disclaimer: They are not hidden on the shelf behind the raspberry preserves. I looked.)
This is how I wound up at the Fresh Market. As I approached the entrance, I was greeted by this sign above the entrance:
I smiled wistfully (from the German wistful “as much as you can comfortably put in a wist”), knowing that they would in fact be seeing me soon. Then I stepped inside to be seen.
I was immediately surrounded by a dizzying array of foods and food byproducts. But as I entered the produce section, I began to realize that something was awry (more than afoot, less than amiss). Rather than the normal foods they sell in my regular supermarket, Fresh Market is a leading retailer of GMOs (Grammatically Modified Organisms). Here’s what I mean:
A Labor of Like 