As I was wrapping bagels in BPA-free plastic wrap like I learned on YouTube, first splitting them in half, and stacking them in BPA-free freezer bags, I stopped to think about my strange situation.
My husband and I were white-collar professionals enjoying a simple but comfortable life in California. My kids went to a “good” school and had their own cell phones and Nintendo Switches. Yet here I was, standing on a paint-splattered workbench in my garage, preparing for a future in which the local grocery store would be empty of bread.
This seemed like a realistic possibility to me, born of experience. In the spring of 2020, supermarket shelves were cleared of toilet paper, paper towels, and many cleaning and medical supplies. White flour and sugar were unavailable as adults stuck at home indulged in baking during the summer. There was a sign between the eggs asking for one dozen per customer. Everyone wore masks and shuffled through the cave-like interior. It’s like being a space explorer on a terrifying new planet. It’s an anxious and miserable world whose faceless inhabitants have never mastered the logistics of supply chains.
Where was the cheerful and prosperous American world of old? Where were the shelves stacked deep with Charmins, Sparkles, Brownies, King Arthurs, Dominos, and Gold Medals? It all disappeared like a dream, only to mostly come back gradually and most of all unreliably. The underlying assumption that middle-class American mothers can walk into a grocery store and purchase essentials for their families was shaken in 2020. Four years after “two weeks to flatten the curve,” supermarket shelves are visibly changing. It’s emptier than it was before the pandemic. Even when the masks come off, the nation’s mothers are beginning to realize that “normal” life will never return. And no one knows what will happen next.
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In preparation for the breadless winter of ’22-’23, I flash-frozen the most nutritious bagels I could find. The bagels, made by an ex-felon named Dave who reinvented himself as a health bread mogul, each contained what he called 11 grams of protein and five of his “super grains.” When I took my kids out of the toaster in January, I imagined them wide-eyed with joy. surprise! — When all my friends with lowly mothers went weeks without bread.
“In this house,” I said in a twinkly voice, like a brunette June Cleaver, Cream cheese? ”
Have you lost it? As I wrapped the bagel, this unanswered question plagued my mind. I was trying to overturn the normalcy bias, the lazy notion that the future will be okay and the same as it always was. But did I go too far in another direction? Last month, I ordered a “Breakfast and Dinner Variety Pail” of freeze-dried foods. Now, the 4-gallon tub was in the garage next to what my husband called the “beer fridge” but I was beginning to think was the “survival fridge.” When pasta went on sale, I bought extra boxes of penne, spaghetti, and elbow macaroni, and now they sit on my workbench in the garage, dumbfounded that they’re even there.
I’m not a full-fledged prepper, I just recently dabbled in the art of prepping when Johnny came along. If the Northern California Holodomor were to occur, we would last about 5 days. Then I was going to send her husband to Larry’s to fight over Cheerios or whatever was left, and wish him the best of luck with her. If you need milk or cheese, you can barter it on the black market. I did not know! Was this idea interesting? I could no longer distinguish between cartoonish exaggeration and believable future scenarios.
Regardless, things seemed to be heading south. Grocery shopping is only slightly less anxious than it was in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Back then, most remote working moms rarely set foot in a store (which was considered almost criminally reckless given the option of home delivery) and nervously wiped down their purchases with bleach. Was. Wet wipes and digital thermometers quickly disappeared from the aisles.
Those of us who had the courage and recklessness to continue to show up had a front row seat to the alarming state of American commerce. A middle-aged woman who has been in charge of her family’s shopping for decades has never seen anything so bleak, with arrows on the floor showing where to walk and signs reminding her to behave as if she were in kindergarten. I had never seen such a shelf before. It was a reminder that we were lucky to be allowed into stores, given the ever-changing civic context of state and local mandates.
In 2022, Americans returned to in-person shopping, but the experience was nothing like it was in 2019. Due to chronic staffing issues and a new $15 minimum wage, our local supermarket has installed self-checkout kiosks staffed by robots. scold on behalf of humans. While shoppers scanned and bagged their groceries, an employee stayed nearby to troubleshoot the robot, which was overly sensitive and unfriendly. In a commercial hub the size of a soccer field, only one or two checkout aisles were open at any given time.These rows are populated with people (peoplemanned?) The aisle was horribly long.
Although I was disappointed with self-checkout, I wasn’t against manual labor. itself. I just wanted to do it at home in between my work and chores.scan groceries at someone other than thatWhile they watched from the sidelines, his work was new. Also, I’m not good at bagging, and I couldn’t tell the difference between Danjou and Bartlett, Fuji and Pink Lady. I missed the social fun of the checkout line at every produce section at the baseball stadium I was supposed to fill. 3 minutes of courteous customer service.
Worst of all, there was no human shield to distract us from 2022 food prices. Every barcode I scanned displayed a shocking price on the kiosk screen as the robot yelled at me to place all my items in the bagging area. (Apparently, it was accusing me of stealing. It was profiling me. humanly Profiled by a cyber supremacist version of “Wally”. ) Why did everything cost so much?
By April, grocery prices had gone up outrageously and I was yelling at my kids about the value of the dollar. If they wanted money for video games or acoustic guitars, I reacted as if they were targeting 5 cent gumballs. “That’s like three days worth of groceries,” I say. “Soap, peanut butter, mayonnaise, maybe a little plant if I’m lucky. It’s not a big number for me at this point. If I can buy something meaningful with it, that’s great. Good luck.” I say!”
In fact, I was shocked by the rising prices of meat. Over the years, I bucked California’s vegetarian and vegan trends and became a meat eater. In my considered opinion, high-quality meat was best for growing teens. Even though beef, chicken, and bacon were up to 20% more expensive, I stubbornly held on to my beliefs.
But when the situation worsens, even our family’s diet, which was working fine for us, has to change. “How about something delicious?” beans? ” It doesn’t work in our house. When that day comes, the children will know that we were too poor to really have food.
Another reason to freeze in bulk is: Even if he has groceries in stock after six months, rising inflation may mean he won’t be able to afford them. On the Internet, savvy Americans were encouraging people to find a local farmer, buy a slaughtered cow, and freeze 450 pounds of beef for later cooking. really bad. Other suggestions included starting a vegetable garden or raising chickens. In theory, these ideas cannot be condemned. They had no relation to my life at all. I wasn’t Marr Ingalls, I was an iconic analyst whose cooking depended on typing the word “easy” into DuckDuckGo. A packaged cut of meat is still fine, but having a $2,500 cow jigsaw puzzle in your garage is stressful and driving you crazy.
“Please eat something delicious. beans! ”
“But there’s a whole cow in there, right?”
“I’m doing my best!”
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Meanwhile, the rustling voices were getting louder and louder. Good thing Families were struggling to buy meat and gasoline. Haven’t we destroyed the planet enough? Have we killed enough innocent animals? But in 2022, we were still selfishly feeding and transporting viral vectors, our carbon footprint, and our children. American parents were bad people who needed to be reined in! Our unapologetic lifestyle of driving cars, eating hamburgers, and listening to the radio, yes, the radio. –It was very 20th century, very privileged, very irresponsible, very finished. The future we deserved was riding our bikes while chewing on dandelion stalks and crying.
This latest phenomenon, the selfishness of ordinary American life, worried me more than missing a taco. After 2020, I learned that social conditioning is serious business.
Four years ago in the spring, madness descended on California, trapping 40 million people in a fever dream of clinical hysteria. All of a sudden, it felt selfish to walk around the park with your face bare. Going to the beach was selfish. Visiting relatives was selfish. I sincerely express my desire for children to return to school. So Self-indulgence. The governor assumed emergency powers to allow the state to punish any such self-serving behavior, a power he retains to this day. In Shanghai, it was considered selfish to leave your apartment. I was too selfish to be allowed to leave my apartment.
Looking to the future, things we take for granted now, like eating red meat, owning a car, and being able to paint a wall without first checking with BlackRock, will become a reality. , it was easy to imagine what would become a sordid pursuit tomorrow. Even if it were technically possible in the completely unimaginable year of 2030, such activities would be widely condemned and the remaining hidden practitioners would be shamed.
Will our children someday see our lifestyle in 2022, with its white stucco house and eight-year-old Honda in the driveway, as the pinnacle of luxury, a prelapsarian paradise, as if Nabokov were a Russian aristocrat? I sometimes wondered if my children would ever see it, just as I remembered my childhood. In the 1910s.
Rational, educated people have come to openly admit that the future is not so great for America’s children. When they weren’t exchanging canned chips or nuclear bomb shelter blueprints, many Americans were expressing sympathy for their children and grandchildren. On Easter Sunday, my relatives and I calmly and rationally discussed the suddenly appealing option of leaving the country. Why hang around when you can work remotely from Costa Rica? Or risk your EU citizenship and watch it all go up in flames from a distant ocean while eating wine and cheese?
However, I did not want to advise my children to move to Costa Rica. I wanted them to remain here, in the land of their birth. There, until recently, citizenship was considered a lucky vacation. Specifically, I explained that I would like to see my adult daughter “living in a fortified compound with armed guards in every tower.” And a large vegetable garden. And a cow. ”
When the words left my mouth, I realized that I was describing a medieval castle. yes! that’s right!
Well, let’s see. It was impossible to know what form the terrible future would take. All I knew was that my bagels were 12 better than yesterday because I had enough freeze-dried stroganoff to gather my wits about when things went wrong with the fan.
The freezer bags were also BPA free.
Sharpie in hand, I placed a date label on the sealed bag: 4/19/22. Throughout 2020 and 2021, people have been thinking wistfully about the Before Times, a long gone era when life was relatively comfortable and carefree. The last month of Before Times was February 2020, and at the time he had no idea anything was coming to an end.
April 2022, we were led to believe we were on the After Times, but for some reason writing the date on a freezer bag seemed creepy. It felt like a second Before Times. A brief respite before the next crisis engulfs us, just a respite during the now anticipated national disaster.
A small voice whispered in my ear. You will need a larger freezer.
