Sigmund Freud is alive and well in Michigan

We have now returned from North Carolina (the adventures therein will be the subject of further entries) and have gone for some grocery shopping.

It is this which looms large in my consciousness at this time - observations on the nature of grocery shopping in the USA vis-a-vis the same experience in England.

Firstly, let us speak of feminine hygiene products and sausage - and Freudian comparisons thereto. There is an aisle in the store which contains said products for the female. At the head of this aisle, there is a display of packets of sliced pepperoni sausage.

Right . . . am I the only one who finds this to be a little . . . apropos? Disconcerting? We have products which have (let us be fair) emancipated the modern female to do roller bladeing, skydiving, swimming and so forth while wearing tight white trousers and / or Brazilian cut bikinis without either a) embarrassment or b) attracting sharks. The modern female is no longer rendered persona non grata for a week out of every four. Levitican laws notwithstanding, these products have done much to integrate the female into the full enjoyment of life.

(As an aside, how many women reading this want to go roller bladeing during their period? I mean, come on. Most women I know want to stay at home and eat chocolate and drink red wine and watch Patrick Swayze movies. There is nothing wrong with this, but don't market a product to the strains of "It's my life" pretending it can overcome four and a half thousand years of Original Sin - you are asking a lot of a bit of cotton wool with a string attached.)

Anyway . . . said (emancipating) products are placed next to a metaphorical emasculation product . . . is this a victory for Germaine Greer or what? Is this the First Church of the Magdalene's lobbyists really earning those tithe-dollars? Have I thought about this too much? And could I rip off Sienfeld's style any more if I tried?

Okay, let us discuss what else I saw there. Jack Daniel's alcopops. Yes, you heard me right - JD as an alcopop.

Okay, goys and burls, let me let you into a secret. I drink Jack. I drink Jack or Maker's Mark - both of these are Southern-style Bourbons whose claim to fame according to the marketing man is that they have a good-ol' Southern style to them. Not sure what a good-ol' Southern style is - often these things say on the label "As served to Conferderate troops before the battle of Gettysburg". No wonder they lost.

Because this is the truth of the matter - such things are an acquired taste. They are, perhaps, a taste which is best not acquired. It is said that Coke will dissolve a tooth or clean a penny - Jack not only eats its way through the ABC suit, but is banned in most Middle Eastern countries.

(So is all alcohol - this is hyperbole.)

(Note for the Americans in the audience - hyper-bole is not a large form of tree trunk.)

One is not supposed to like these things when one first drinks them. They are not supposed to be palatable initially. Drinking them is a rite of passage - and a more threatening and impressive one than killing a non-threatening animal the size of a small car with a .45 calibre rifle at 200 yards with a scope and two shots. Look, just don't get me started on the whole "hunting in Michigan" thing - "I'm proud of my son" said some fool of a father on TV. Yeah, he killed something that never hurt him with his own gun before he was old enough to celebrate with a drink afterwards. God Bless America - it sure needs the help.

Anyway, speaking of youngsters and alcohol - WTF is going on with the concept of a Jalckopop? (I am patenting that). I get the idea of a vodka-based alcopop - vodka has very little taste. It is, essentially, something added to soft drinks in order to get a little sloshed without the disgusting taste side effects of the usual rotgut. White wine based drinks are another one favoured by girls who spend three hours getting ready and wear more make-up and jewelery than clothes.

But a Bourbon-based alcopop? That is some hideous concept - the drink itself was a kind of mouthwash pink. It came in a beer-style bottle and a little cardboard case carrying four of them. Supposedly, this makes you look hard and tough.

Lads, let me break this to you gently - you are drinking something the colour of a tart's boudoir - you look about as gay as Liberace and less-tough than that kid in third grade the nerds stole lunch money from. Don't touch the Jalckopop with a bargepole - unless you are going to use said pole to push it into the canal. And, hey - such cruelty to fish can't be any worse than shooting them. I guess they only do it in barrels here.

Butter - this is another thing. Butter. In England, you do two things with butter - you put it on bread products, or you cook with it. Not here - here it is two things; i) whipped and ii) a condiment. Let's address these travesties one at a time.

Whipped butter. It ceases at this stage to be yellow - it goes white. It is also - because of the vast quantity of air in there - easy to spread straight from the fridge.

Hello? If I wanted something that was easy to spread straight from the fridge, I would eat margarine! Don't usurp my homogonised ("Hehe - he said homo!") industrial-plastic-manufacture-by-product's position in gradually turning my arteries into silicon based tubes! Damn you, with you healthy farm-house spread make usable via the fiendish technology of a whisk! Butter is supposed to be a chore - it is supposed to come in lumps which tear the bread into slivers. Don't you understand? If spreading your toast is easy, why, everyone would do it! No-one would need oranges for marmalade - think of the Californians and the Floridians! They need the tax-dollars - they are, after all, living in a tornado-shy and on a fault-line.

Okay, here is the big problem - a condiment. It just gets stuck on everything here - I made Liza some rice last night, and she put butter on it. She sticks it on greens and potatoes and meat and omelettes and fish and giraffes and . . .

(More things which are "not large tree trunks", there.)

Anyway, they sell many forms of "pseudo-butter". Some of them have names like "I can't believe it's not butter" and so forth. We have these too. However, I am - as an Englishman in Detroit (it's like an Englishman in New York, but further north-west, with less jobs and nicer cab-drivers) - perpetually thinking "I can't believe it is butter" - for the butter here comes in silly little sticks; these appear to be the de facto measurement for butter. "A stick". "A stick and a half". Four sticks make a pound.

No, 16 oz make a pound. Four sticks make a very small fire or a malformed tepee.

I am going to market a product called "F*** me, it's butter". It will be butter - and nothing else. It will be yellow. It will come in one pound blocks. It will not be in sticks. It will not be whipped. It will say on the side "Not to be used as a condiment. A portion of the profit goes to supporting rich dotcom millionaires and retirees who have gone to live in a State with perpetual sunshine, but a bad disaster record."

And that brings me on to another thing; weights and measures. I can understand that the gasoline is measured in gallons - we do it in litres, because the "ccs" of our car engine capacities are cubic centimetres rather than concert chambers, and we tend to get miles to the gallon rather than gallons to the mile. It is still a liquid sold by volume.

Okay, why do I have to order a "24 oz" beer? Why is flour measured in "cups"? Only in the USA would I order a beer and a clam chowder and have to order the drink by weight and the food by volume.

Sticks and cups and weight for liquids - what is this? Is this some Federal conspiracy to stop people from knowing how big stuff is? "Maybe then they won't notice the fact we are paying $1642.34 for a toilet seat!"

Cheese and pasta, people - pasta and cheese. Let's get this entirely straight - pasta is not a hard thing to cook; you boil it until soft as you like. In water. Measured by volume.

Cheese sauce is pretty simple to - you have some hot milk, you whisk in flour, you melt in grated cheese. The work of five minutes. None of these ingredients are complex - none of them are hard to find. They do not require specialised skills or stores or storage. One does not need to be a master with five year's experience to remove the wrapper from cheese; Monterey Jack is not the Japanese Fugo Fish.

So why the Sam Hill are there, not one or two, but about a million different kinds of "pasta with cheese" Instameal (TM)? How can these people make a living? "Hey, Tarquin - we need a new product! That Jalckopop didn't go down too well - we've got guys too-queer for CNN holding up liquor stores." "Don't worry, Tony - I've got it. More pasta and sauce crap - kids love it." "Thanks, Tarquin - have some stock options."

In short, shopping in the USA in an experience. One I would recommend to anyone with the patience of a Saint and the capacity to withstand multiple cardiac shocks. I will leave you with one final note, something that I found really surprising.

You cannot buy brown-shelled eggs. All the eggs are whiter than snow - haven't the chicken farmers heard of the Emancipation Proclamation?

Darknight