Voyeurism

I assume we all feel a certain curiosity about what other people eat. I know when I am in the supermarket checkout line, I look with interest at what the person in front of me sets out on the conveyer belt. All to often, I find myself feeling judgemental about it: So much meat! Look at all that soda! I particularly bemoan a collection of bad food when it is both unhealthful and expensive and is being bought by someone who I can see needs better nutrition and a lower grocery bill.

As a grocery selector, I get to see what whole communities are eating, or at least the customers of a whole store. My shots are only part of a store’s order, so I don’t get a complete overview, but I do get a sense of the order’s relative quantities of the items I am selecting.

So far, the most disturbing has been an order for Akwesasne, NY — a Mohawk community. I assume that, like most Indians, the people there are poor and suffer a lot of health problems, so I was sorry to see how much money they are wasting on Kool Aid. Case after case of flavor after flavor of the trashy sugar water drink mix. Also a great deal of ranch dressing. Maybe the Mohawks have a casino now and are rich, though, in which case I am sorry that their money hasn’t bought them good taste and good sense.

Apparently the military is one of the company’s biggest customers. I filled part of an order for Mitchell Field Command, in Garden City, NY, and was surprised by the quantity of air fresheners and other stink-suppressors. Including lavender air freshener, which doesn’t seem very Spartan-like. Are our people in uniform a bunch of nancy-boys and -girls? An alternate interpretation, I suppose, is that soldiers just stink more than most people.

The people of Southbridge, MA, are completely brownie-crazed, if one may judge by the half-pallet of Betty Crocker brownie mixes (three kinds).