The Logan Notebooks

Things Found in a Local Grocery Store

10 things found in a local grocery store Seasoning for homemade elk or antelope jerky. A friend explains this is a gimmick.You just need salt, sugar, maybe some garlic powder. She adds as an afterthought, It’s really low-fat. Muhammara, a paste of red pepper, pomegranate molasses, walnuts, olive oil, cumin. Simmer with chicken, or scoop with bread. A handsome young Lebanese man hand makes it. It’s the same rust-red as the Southern Arches and, like them, suggests sun. Next to the freezer aisle, with its soy burgers and supreme pizzas and crinkle-cut fries, there’s a food storage aisle—rows of coffee cans, all babyroom pastel, labeled DehydratedTaco Meat Substitute, or Chocolate Beverage Powder, or Eggs. A tagboard promotional sign reads Church Bulk Orders Available. When the zombies are picking their teeth with the rest of the world’s finger bones, Utah will be safe in its basements, feasting on reconstituted mashed potatoes. There’s the usual stuff—pink tomatoes, bagged salad darkening in the corners, pale gelatinous salmon or flaccid little gray shrimp, cemented butter, batteries, packets of dried hollandaise or onion soup mix. Jars of fancy pickled cauliflower with tiny hot red pepper flakes suspended in the oddly viscous juices. Nail polish remover. Mouthwash. And there’s a deli counter, cold glass guarding a bowl of Frog-Eye Salad, wobbly mix of tapioca and little mandarin orange crescents.There’s a ham studded with maraschinos and pineapple rings, a lasagna that seems to have cottage cheese in it, and two salads garnished liberally with fake bacon. What bomb shelter did they haul this out of? My sister wants to know. But there’s one little wooden trellis shelved with loaves of bread whose flaxen crusts you could knock like a door, bejeweled with purple olives, or cloves of roasted garlic soft as cheese, or else confettied with an anthology of seeds.They are as warm and heavy as genuine optimism. We buy a couple of bison ribeyes, a garlicky pillar of local goat’s cheese, beets, butter lettuce, aVirgin of Guadalupe candle. Behind the checkout, one of my students greets me with his Bugs Bunny grin, What’s up, Doc? ...