the secret life of groceries, 1

When I was a kid, one of my many great misconceptions about the world was that everyone at every business establishment my parents took me to was a total professional and knew everything there was to know about whatever business that person worked in.  This went from when my dad consulted with bankers or auto mechanics and stretched all the way into the sixteen-year-old who took my Happy Meal order.  I just thought employment was some sort of empowering experience.  And being allowed past the mysterious “Employee’s Only” barrier was a privilege earned by possessing fantastic skill and know-how.

I work at a healthy-ish-oriented grocery store, my first job after graduating college.  Everyone should work in a grocery store at some point, for a little while.  I’ve learned more about people in this job than I have at any previous job.  What people eat is a big deal.  I apply this to myself when I use the self check-out at H-E-B in hopes of concealing what food I eat from as many people as possible.  I get shy about buying macaroni and cheese.

My store functions on the idea that people will jump on any health trend known to the public. No matter how silly or restricting an idea is (people get amino acids as a substitute for meat substitutes, and I always thought amino acids were unavoidable as long as you ate some sort of organic material), we have a clientele for it.

The clientele, by the way, is mostly hippies, neo-hippies, and really old people.  A lot of really old people.  Something I’ve determined: that old person smell is more a result of not showering or cleaning clothing than it is part of simple aging.

I was told, when I applied, that something over sixty people work at the store, many of them in just one or two short shifts per week.  As anyone who has ever been employed anywhere has realized, every employee served some sort of intangible niche.  The anal-retentive and overly serious manager, the totally lazy stock boy, the air-headed bulk loader, the big and muscly meat market dude, the hyper cashier chick, the flamboyant gay guy, the old, the young, the queer, the bland.  Some places just strive for some sort of balanced personality encyclopedia on the payroll.

I didn’t know where I’d fit into that.  I was first put in the meat market.  I didn’t eat beef or pork, and I only now-and-then ate poultry and fish.  But within a month, I went vegetarian.

I was needed in the meat market because, a few months prior, an employee became seriously injured in the back room.  The back room includes sinks, a meat grinder (note: 80 percent lean ground beef has leftover chunks of old fat added to it to achieve its ratio), cutting table, and a bone saw.  When we wash it, we just spray everything down with a hose.  Water just collects.  Said employee slipped and grabbed a porcelain sink.  As I was told, geysers or black blood and serious nerve damage resulted.  And I was to be the added help to a short-staffed market.

Customers complain about the appearance of the meat.  I tell them it’s the blood, and I’m not lying.  People are picky about a slab of dead animal, and I figure that how much blood is where is kind of splitting hairs.  Some people have you go through a pile of shrimp to find the ones that are slightly more curled up.  Or they debate the comparative thickness of chops all cut on the same setting of the same saw.  But the blood, or rather the fact that it’s a dead animal’s blood, doesn’t bother them.  I get it on my arms, my pants, my shoes.  Even sometimes on my face, if something splashed just wrong.

We will not fail an audit because we forge the hell out of everything and the auditors hate venturing behind the counter as much as the next person.  Meat temperatures are rarely taken, the sanitizer water is never calibrated, shipments come that temperature “danger zone.”  It’s not fantastic at all, but, people have never complained of falling ill and, really, unless something’s broken, things are as they should be.  But it’s not like I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

Two of the butchers barely speak any English.  My relationship with them has always been really friendly.  Which, really, is the case for any relationship I’ve had with someone with whom I did not share a common spoken language.  It makes me wonder if we should just all speak a different language, because the little bit that everyone learns of other languages is pleasantries, like how to politely say hello or good bye or bless someone when they sneeze.  And it’s always, “how are you?”  Reply: “I’m well, thank you.”

So it’s fun to hang around long enough to learn that behind the polite Chapter 1 phrase book sayings are sex-crazed alcoholics.  Who teased me about how many bananas I eat by enacting anal sex with one another in full view of the whole store.

Then there’s the food itself.  Just.  Check expiration dates, always, and don’t fuck with the people handling your food.

Hopefully, anyone for whom chicken is a staple won’t experience how a batch of frozen chicken tenders comes to us.  In a cardboard box, wrapped in plastic, frozen together in a rectangle that weighs something like twenty or thirty pounds, depending on the packing.  This is what I imagine human meat looks like frozen: this sort of pale white and dirty yellow, oozing pink juice.  Chicken juice, by the way, is the one of the most slippery and skin-irritating substances I’ve come across.  Anyway, since people buy slashes of chicken breast by the armloads, the store rarely gets to thaw out the shipments of tenders fast enough, which prompts the use of a large metal pick and the venting of frustration about, I don’t know, some girl you dated in high school who fucked you over, whatever it takes to plow into that citadel of chicken muscle and pry apart the strips of gooey, rubbery flesh.

If something falls on the floor, it does not get washed.  We can’t use any kind of agent that might clean things, because it’ll fuck up the taste of the meat more than the grunge on the floor would fuck it up.  This is the same policy practiced by every person who has ever served you french fries.  And the floor is so bloodied and greased and grimed that many employees have stipulated in writing that they will not set foot upon it.

Do you remember the episode of the The Simpsons where Homer gets obsessed with grease collection?  It’s all true.  A huge tub of chicken grease from the rotisserie oven is kept, and when it gets enough gallons of goo in it, the tub gets dumped into a giant metal bin out back.  Recently, the bin overflowed when one of the meat market workers tried to dump the chicken grease.

And there’s more.  Drugs and lawsuits and harassments and people trapped in trash compressors.  But that’s for later.