#686 Uber-Market

So the other day I was in the supermarket.
I love saying “supermarket.” It makes me think I’ll find things there from the planet Krypton or something. This is where Superboy shops for his super red BVDs.
And you can’t get super muscles without super supplements and power drinks and energy bars and lots and lots of additives to preserve freshness.
That’s what really makes the market super—everything in there is packaged to put on a shelf. And everything on the shelf has a shelf life clearly marked on it.
In third world countries, excuse me, emerging economies, they have markets out in the open with flies and animal poop and stuff and you’re never sure if the mongoose bladder you’re buying is fresh or about ready to go over. Or the yak soup will make you yak indeed. Gustatory sickness is just around every steaming, putrid corner.
But not here. Here two-thirds of the calories the average American consumes are represented by four crops—corn, soybeans, rice and wheat. Because we have better living through chemicals and if we don’t like our food we can magically change it to a new shape. We can strip all the vitamins out of something and then add them back in. Grind it down to a paste and then form it up into creative and wonderful figures and representations of what fresh food used to look like.
Like vegetables? We have crackers shaped like vegetables.
Like fruit? Trix now comes in not just fruit-flavored but fruit-shaped sugar pellets.
The super power of extrusion technology.
So, when I went through the supermarket cereal aisle I saw a very interesting product. It was Eggo Waffle-shaped, cinnamon toast flavored, breakfast cereal. Three, count em, three breakfasts, waffles, cinnamon toast, and cereal, all rolled into one artistically extruded rendering. And not bacon and eggs either. Three starchy breakfasts—waffles, toast and cereal.
And the funny thing is, one aisle over, you could get actual Eggo waffles, whose prefab preparation requirements had already been reduced to putting them in a toaster.
But these were waffle-shaped things you could put on a shelf in your pantry for ten years! Now that’s super, man!
America, ya gotta love it.