Apr 22 2008
Food shopping
I was at an ethnic Vietnamese store last week. Though I am by no means an expert chef– I tend to experiment quite a bit with various foods and flavors, and the disheveled kitchen left in the wake of one of my madcap schemes can attest to that– I consider my culinary skills close to that of an enthused dilettante.
As readers of my blog know, I am a Vietnamese immigrant, and I find that whenever I enter one of these ethnic “mom and pop” Vietnamese grocery stores, I have the peculiar sense of coming home. I don’t know if there is an equivalent for someone born and raise in the American mainstream, but I suppose the feeling is akin to childhood memories of your grandmother or grandfather fixing family recipes of spaghetti or barbeques that have been passed down one generation to the next like family heirlooms. There is that sense of familiarity, of home and tradition.
These kinds of thoughts usually scroll through my mind every time I enter the Vietnamese grocery store near my house in Southern California. More than any other of the five senses, my sense of smell is most strongly linked to these feelings, which hover just below my conscious mind, just high enough on the strata to evoke these strong emotions but not high enough to produce concrete thoughts and memories.
In any case, as I left the store with my plastic bags full of all kinds of weeds– not the kind cropping up to ruin your flowerbed out back but the edible kind, like spinach– I stopped the Indian clerk and pointed to a stack of puffy rectangular white bags lined against the glass wall facing the parking lot.
“Say, how much do those rice bags cost nowadays?”
He smiled ruefully, “Which ones?”
“I don’t know. How about the white one over there? The one with the Three Buddha’s?”
“That’s about twenty-five dollars, and you don’t even want to know how much the brown one costs.”
That’s twenty-five bucks. Twenty-five clams for a bag only slightly larger than my backpack.
“How much?”
“You’re not going to believe this. Forty-five dollars.” The young Indian man (from India) looked surprised as he said it; though I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he said it.
“You’re kidding me. Rice is a staple, right?”
“We’ve stopped importing rice,” he said. “What we’ve got is what we’ve got. Prices won’t be going down until August.”
I didn’t do any fact checking on what he said, but my conversations with my brother back home in Houston seemed to confirm the young man’s assertions. And then I encounter this article today fresh off the Drudge Report:
At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.
“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”
The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.
“You can’t eat this every day. It’s too heavy,” a health care executive from Palo Alto, Sharad Patel, grumbled as his son loaded two sacks of the Basmati into a shopping cart. “We only need one bag but I’m getting two in case a neighbor or a friend needs it,” the elder man said.
The Patels seemed headed for disappointment, as most Costco members were being allowed to buy only one bag. Moments earlier, a clerk dropped two sacks back on the stack after taking them from another customer who tried to exceed the one-bag cap.
“Due to the limited availability of rice, we are limiting rice purchases based on your prior purchasing history,” a sign above the dwindling supply said.
It looks like we’re going to be in for some chop. I think I’m not alone when I say that Americans are beginning to experience a profound unease with the direction of the world, as though we are looking down a precipice.
Some pundits and commentators in hopes to alleviate worries suggest that we aren’t, by definition, in a recession and it’s not yet time to panic. Some have even suggested that this pervasive sense that we’re at the end of an epoch is but a manufactured propaganda by the liberals and the Democratic Party. That may be so, but I don’t think this explains how completely non-political people– and I know many– people who couldn’t care less about politics– why they share the very same unease.
Be that as it may, the material fact of our situation portends danger in the future. It is a very straightforward equation and it’s rightly raising red flags all over. The world has X amount of fuel for motive power, i.e. petroleum, in a world of increasing demand. The world has X amount of food to feed itself, and farms across Asia and elsewhere are turning into desert, while other fields are diverted from food production to the creation of biofuels. All this combined with a tenuous stability in transportation, which is made more uncertain with the rise of piracy and terrorism, makes people rightly concerned about the future.
Where will all this lead?
When I finally got in my car and turned on the engine, I thought, perhaps I should have bought a bag of rice after all.