Blast from the Grocery Past!

So this evening searching for television content, any content ( 🙄 ), I come across some sort of ersatz redneck cooking show. They’re going on about down-home Southern cookin’ and this makes me curious to look up deviled crab and buttermilk pie in an old regional cookbook that came down to me from my mother.

Yea verily, I find the original recipes. And they’re singularly uninteresting — dull compared to the recipes the show’s producers had tracked down, heavy, and pedestrian. But what should fall out of the book but an old, yellowed grocery receipt. A long, LONG old yellowed grocery receipt.

Though it’s faded and hard to make out, it has a hundred entries on it! And all those purchases, marked as meat and produce and “groceries” (whatever that is) came to a grand total of $89.85. No single item in this piled-up shopping basket came to more than a few dollars. And no single item is named: just the price next to a code showing the merchandise classification.

Imagine buying 100 grocery items for $90 today! A beef roast would have cost around $3.50; a pound of bacon, a buck or so.

Oddly, the receipt shows sale after sale after sale of 21-cent items.

What on earth?

The thing was dated September 28, 1978. Issued by Madison Pay ’N’ Take It, once the best grocer in town — back in the day when you couldn’t buy a decent chunk of cheese in a supermarket and most Americans thought table wine was called Blue Nun or Boone’s Farm.

In September 1978, my son was less than 18 months old. Possibly all those 21-cent items were bottles of baby food?

Unlikely. I used to make his food: I’d use the blender to purée whatever we ate, if it wasn’t too spicy, plus frozen vegetables and fresh fruits. Might have bought one or two baby foods, but certainly not two dozen bottles of baby food. The stuff was full of all sorts of adulterants and fake flavors. That was why I went to the trouble of mashing up piles of real food.

Ah yes: Not baby food, but tiny one-serving bottles of baby juice.

Fake baby juice.

In 1978, I had fallen for the “we’re sooo NATURAL” advertising campaign of a company called Beechnut. It still manufactures baby foods. At the time, it boasted that it was selling wonderful, healthful, all-“natural,” 100 percent pure juice.

In fact, what it was selling was 100 percent sugar water with a little dye added to make it look like juice. Eventually the company was fined $2 million for this particularly nasty scam.

Not, however, before their “juice” had rotted out my son’s baby teeth. The dentist, having had to drill half a dozen of his little teeth, yelled at me for feeding him sugar. I had no idea what he was talking about — I had been downright obsessive about keeping sugar away from him. To the point where relatives and babysitters thought I was crazy!

To this day, my son hates dentists. To this day, I hate big corporate food producers.

That probably was the first clue I had of how evil some of these companies are, and how shabby the food-like products that fill our grocery store aisles really are.

But in 1978, there we were, still in the Organic Garden of Eden: yet to discover the snake was harvesting the apple tree.

Halcyon days.