Trader Joe's
It's like India in my freezer - and in this case, that's actually a good thing!
I don’t make any bones about the fact that I am, by and
large, a disgusting lazy bachelor, but I’ve always prided myself on the fact
that I eat relatively few frozen dinners compared to my disgusting, lazy
contemporaries. This isn’t to say that the non-frozen meals I’m eating are
especially fancy – go through my garbage and you’ll find a lot of extra large
containers of Ralph’s brand peanut butter that have been all but licked clean –
but at least I have some influence over those meals’ preparation, even if all
I’m doing is spreading peanut butter onto bread and perhaps drizzling Sriracha
on top of that if I’m feeling particularly fancy. (Seriously, try it.)
Even though I’m lazy and a sucker for convenience, because
of my upbringing I’ve always been wary of frozen dinners. My mother is at least
twice as good a cook as Gordon Ramsay (and three times as profane in the
kitchen) so there were never Hungry Man TV dinners in our freezer. Whenever a
news report about the obesity epidemic came on NPR she would blame it on the
popularity of preservative-laden, salty, prepackaged frozen foods.
As a result, I’ve always distrusted preservatives, which is
why I never really went in for frozen dinners. Mind you, I can’t actually name any preservatives (other than
salt), nor can I articulate specifically why
they’re bad – to me they’re just an invisible monster that lives in food and
must be avoided at all costs because Mom said so a few times in the late 1990s.
What makes this stupid is that while my mother prepared all
of our food more or less from scratch, my diet is still jam packed with
preservatives – it just so happens that these aren’t the ones I was conditioned
to hate as a kid. Diet Coke, cheap pasta, store-brand peanut butter… I’m scared
to look at the lists of ingredients in these staples, but I wouldn’t be
surprised if I’m just slowly embalming myself.
Last month, though, my roommates and I threw a party, and
being as we’re all grown ups now I decided the party merited some classy grown
up appetizers. This put me in a bind – I either had to spontaneously become a
good enough chef to cobble together classy grown up appetizers from scratch or
compromise all of my values and buy frozen classy grown up appetizers at the
supermarket.
I decided almost immediately to compromise all of my values,
as I often do when it’s between my values and doing something I don’t
particularly want to do. On my way out the door I decided to at least buy my
classy grown up appetizers at Trader Joe’s, both because they would probably
have fewer preservatives than the ones at Ralph’s and also because Trader Joe’s
happens to be two blocks away from Baja Fresh.*
*I’m always thinking two meals ahead.
While I had eaten plenty of food from Trader Joe’s – most of
the ingredients in Mom’s incredible food came from there – I had never actually
been to one before last month. I just knew it as a mysterious place from whence
all natural hippie food came. When I was a kid I thought Trader Joe was just
some guy my Mom knew who really liked quinoa.
Shopping at Trader Joe’s for the first time was really no
major shock, though. Being from Oregon I’ve seen my fair share of organic
supermarkets; what really blew my mind was that most of the food at Trader
Joe’s was so cheap that even I, with my 1960s era expectations of what things
should cost*, was impressed.
*I pretty much feel like everything should cost $5 or less.
This is probably why I struggled with economics in college.
An employee with Predator-style
dreadlocks helped me find the frozen food aisle and the classy grown up
appetizers I was looking for. Before I could leave, though, my eyes fell on the
frozen dinner selection, and my life – and eating habits – changed forever.
Trader Joe’s sells frozen all natural microwaveable Indian
meals for less than $4.
Let me repeat that: Trader
Joe’s sells frozen all natural microwaveable Indian meals for less than $4. Checkmate,
pessimists! Here, finally, we have a food that satisfies all my requirements
for what food ought to be: Quick to prepare, convenient, relatively healthy,
free of nefarious preservatives, and Indian. I have finally found my bachelor chow.
Knowing that these products exist has gone a long way to
simplify my shopping routine – now I just drive to Trader Joe’s every Sunday,
grab seven or eight frozen Indian dinners, and proceed straight to checkout. The
one complication is that it’s kind of difficult to look the cashier in the eye
while buying a tall stack of frozen dinners and nothing else, but I’ve gotten
pretty good at lying to save face.
“Ha ha, I bet this
looks pretty sad, doesn’t it! This is actually my second time coming here
today; when I was in earlier I bought a bunch of heirloom tomatoes and kale and
a wheel of asiago cheese and some fresh salmon, but when I got home and my
girlfriend found out I forgot these Indian dinners she loves she made me come
right back out here to get them. Women, right? Can’t live with ‘em- Ah, you
know the rest. Good times!”
Now that between one third and two thirds of my daily meals
are all natural microwaveable curry, my peanut butter and discount pasta intake
has declined sharply. I’m eating more food with real food in it and far fewer
preservatives, even if that means I’ve now become the microwavable
dinner-eating slob I swore I’d never become.
I guess compromising on all your values can be a good thing,
so long the values you’re compromising are ill-informed and don’t really matter
that much to begin with.
Truman Capps is going to look back at the archives
and tally up how many blog updates he’s written about grocery
shopping.