First the Lettuce Was Going to Kill Me

Seriously? First the head of lettuce was going to kill me. Now it is just going to wipe out my bank account.

Sigh. Groceries.

You remember the lettuce years. There was a stretch where every other autumn the government got on television and told the entire country to open the refrigerator and throw out all of it. Not a brand. Not a lot number. All romaine, everywhere, into the bin. I did it too. I stood there with a perfectly good head of lettuce over the trash can like a woman disarming a bomb.

So for about a decade the salad was the threat. Wash it twice. Check the news before you make a Caesar.

The salad is not the threat anymore. The salad is the budget.

And here is the part that is actually making me laugh, in the way you laugh when you are annoyed. I was instructed, at length and by many people, to eat all natural. Fresh. Whole. Shop the outside of the store and skip the middle, because the middle is where they keep the poison. Read the label. If your great-grandmother would not recognize it, put it down.

Fine. Sure. I agreed, mostly.

Though I did notice it was frequently the same crowd telling me to eat food that came out of the ground while they were writing checks to companies growing meat in a tank. Yeah, Bill. What does the all-natural rule say about the fake meat? Asking as someone who was just lectured about processing.

Anyway. That instruction is still on the books. Eat all natural. Nobody has withdrawn it. It has simply, quietly, started costing money that a lot of people do not have, and now all natural is in a fistfight with ramen, and ramen is winning on points.

Here is why, and it is not complicated once you look at a cart instead of a chart.

A head of lettuce is mostly water that has to be kept cold across two thousand miles on a clock. It has to be picked, chilled, loaded into a refrigerated trailer that burns fuel to stay cold while it burns fuel to move, driven across a continent, and put on a shelf before it turns. Every single thing in that sentence runs on diesel, and diesel set the highest price in the history of this country this week. Six forty.

Ramen does not care. Ramen sits in a warehouse for a year with no refrigeration and no clock and no drama. It ships dense, it stacks, it does not wilt in a hot trailer outside Barstow. Whatever the fuel does, it does much less of it to the noodle.

So the fuel bill is not landing evenly across the store. It is landing hardest on precisely the food I was told to buy. The perimeter is where the diesel is. The middle is where the shelf life is. And the price of doing what I was told just went up against the price of not doing it.

Which means the instruction has quietly turned into a bracket.

That is the part I want to say out loud, because nobody sponsoring the advice ever says it. Eating well has stopped being a discipline and started being an income. It is not that anyone rescinded the rule. The rule is exactly where it was. Only the list of people who can afford to follow it got shorter, and it will keep getting shorter for as long as the trailer costs what the trailer costs.

And then those same people get told they are making bad choices. In the aisle. With a calculator going in their head.

I am not going to pretend I am the victim here. I will be fine. I will grumble, I will buy the smaller thing, I will make the chicken last an extra night, and I will be annoyed rather than frightened. I have said before that being annoyed instead of frightened is geography, not virtue, and it is still geography.

But I know what a household one rung down from me is doing this week, because I have been that household. They are standing in the produce section doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic says the bag of noodles. It is not ignorance and it is not laziness. It is a correct answer to the prices in front of them.

So spare me the next segment about how Americans should eat better. Tell me what the diesel is doing. That is the same conversation and it has been the same conversation the whole time.

Turns out the lettuce was dangerous after all. Just not to me.

To the month.

— Caroline North