The Costly Crunch

I don’t mean to brag or preen, but yeah: I can afford iceberg lettuce.

I know, I know: Stand back, we got a real Rockefeller coming through. Lookit him in his top hat and tails, beatin’ the beggin’ urchins out of his way with his diamond-tipped walking stick, on his way to see a Broadway premiere where 60 dames in tights do high kicks and then everyone goes to a club and drinks champagne outta slippers. Man, what I couldn’t do with that kinda money.

How did I get to this point? Oh, the usual route. Steady employment, compound interest, didn’t divorce, simple tastes, and not living in a part of the country where you crack a Franklin to buy your morning cup of coffee and egg sandwich, and it’s evaporated by nightfall. But it is one thing to afford iceberg lettuce. It is another thing entirely to be so foolhardy as to buy it.

Let me back up a bit. I do most of the cooking at our house, which is why my wife has such a fetchingly trim figure. It’s technically food, but I wouldn’t call it fine dining. So the other day I’m shopping for ingredients to make Mesoamerican maize sleeves stuffed with carne al Ortega — a.k.a., tacos — and I’m confronting the usual price shocks.

The meat is expensive, but that’s not an issue today. I shop at five grocery stores, and the most upscale one is known for putting out hamburger at loss-leader prices. You gather up an eighth of a cow and freeze it for later. The cheese is expensive, and the store has performed a bit of historical rewriting Orwell would approve of: Once a bag of shredded cheddar would be $2.29. Now it’s $3.39, but they’re having a sale: $3.19. YOU SAVE 20 CENTS!

When you see this you want to channel Howard Beale from the movie Network and perform a great rant to the rest of the shoppers:

“They say I save 20 cents! Well! Ought not I to fall to my knees in thanks? And I would, if my knees were not purple with bruises from all the times I have dropped down in despair at the gallivanting increase in the price of eggs. It’s not your imagination. You didn’t dream of a day when eggs were $2.29 for a dozen. That day was real. That day happened, not long ago, and yet we are expected to pretend that it never existed. That eggs have always been five dollars. Well I am here to tell you that there was a day, yes, there was a time when eggs could be had for two thin dimes apiece, brothers and sisters, and we all know it, and we’re all expected to pretend that we don’t. They expect us to take it. They expect us to bow our heads and be grateful there are any eggs at all.

“Well, I want you to go to the window and throw up the sash and shout: I’m mad as hell, and I’m going to take it for an undefined period of time! Because I’m a registered Democrat, and I’ve convinced myself this is all gouging by Big Egg, and Bernie Sanders will soon appear like Gandalf in that Lord of the Rings scene where he shows up and saves the day, and the Egg Trust will be brought to heel!”

It’s a good thing that Taco Night doesn’t require eggs. But it does require cheddar, so I toss a pack in the cart. As I mentioned, it’s up a buck, so you don’t buy the pre-shredded stuff. You buy a brick of the house brand and grate your own, wondering why it’s grated when you do it but shredded when they do it. And why isn’t Shredded Wheat called “Grated Wheat”? What’s the deal with airplane food? Why do we drive on the parkway but park on the driveway? What’s with all the . . .

Sorry, I enabled Seinfeld mode on my word processor by mistake. Anyway: Next we need shells, and these are also much more than before. You remember the days of spending $2.59 on taco shells, but then we had an insurrection and so I guess $3.59 is a fair price for saving our democracy. Maybe Joe will release some stuff from the Strategic Maize Reserve and bring the price down for an afternoon.

But then you get to the lettuce.

Iceberg lettuce is wet and flavorless. The vodka of vegetables. Its sole role in taco construction is creating a contrast between the hot and spicy elements. If a taco is a sauna, the iceberg lettuce is the plunge in the cold pool. A head of iceberg lettuce is essentially a device for transporting water from one part of the world to the other, with the occasional film of E. coli if you’re buying the organic stuff that’s nurtured with night soil.

A head of lettuce, by itself, is the definition of a worthless foodstuff, but it takes money to get it from there to your taco. So when diesel prices jump, the cost of lettuce vaults upward as well. Once it was two bucks and change. Now it’s four frickin’ fargin’ bleepidee bleeper-bleepin’ dollars?

I could pay that. I can afford it. But I’m not going to pay four dollars for what is, in essence, a crunchy hologram of a vegetable. Forget it. Taco Tuesday is off.

It’ll be six bucks by the time the presidential campaign gets going, and it’s a great issue on which to run. But the Democrats probably won’t be worried. They’ll tell us to use frozen cricket exoskeletons as a substitute — hey, they’re crunchy! — and consider the argument won.