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Careless Abundance

Careless Abundance by: Alison van Diggelen Fresh from my CostCo conversion last week, I had a panic attack in Safeway this afternoon. There I was in the cereals, rice and pasta aisle, and I found myself rooted to the spot, wishing I was back in Scotland. The choice of rice on the supermarket shelf suddenly made me dizzy. I couldn’t decide between boil in the bag, five, ten or twenty minute cook rice; white, brown or red bean variety; long grain, short grain or wild rice; Spanish, Italian or Mexican; saffron or basmati: Jambulaya, Rice-a-Roni or plain old Uncle Bens. I’ve lived in the United States for seven years now and I’m getting nostalgic about the no nonsense, mom and pop grocery store shopping experience back home in Scotland. But the truth is, all the choice you had was take it or leave it and all the scrutiny involved was blowing the dust off the packaging and checking that the goods weren’t too far beyond their “sell by” dates. Looking for service in a Scottish grocery store is like trying to find a haggis at Safeway. In Scotland, if you ask for a particular brand, the response you’ll get is: “if it’s no on the shelve, hen then we dinnae have it.” I’ve been spoiled by clerks here who will give you a personal guided tour for a full half hour until you find the item you want. We call them shop assistants in Scotland, but shop resistants would be more apt. In contrast, it’s a treat to live in Silicon Valley, on the rim of America’s salad bowl, where fruit and veggies are bountiful and cheap. It feels like I’ve arrived in the land of plenty, yet sometimes it gets too much for this frugal Scot. My husband tells me I romanticize my poor childhood. I even have fond memories of the “Winter of Discontent”, when many of the national industries went on strike. There were power outages, riots and rationing of many staple foods. But as a ten year old, it was an adventure. I remember sitting by candle light with my family, sharing two small potatoes which my mother had sliced thinly and fried in the chip pan. I still remember how delicious these chips tasted. We savored every one. Until recently, Safeway size stores were my limit. However, for months I’ve been cajoled by testimonials of almost religious fervor from friends, about the wonder of our new neighborhood CostCo. I was suspicious of its boundless praise and vast size, but last week, I had to buy a picture frame and saw a CostCo ad for the very thing, at a miraculous bargain price. It was the final temptation. I joined the club. On my first visit, I had very little time, so I grabbed my purchase, and got in line. I felt awed by the size of the shopping carts, many piled high with boxes of food and durables. A tray of giant size muffins lay on the conveyor belt ahead of me. They smelled heavenly. My eyes boggled at the price. For the cost of two small muffins at Starbucks, there was a tray of twelve. The next trip I became a born again CostCo addict, a true believer. I bought the muffins I’d coveted. I needed an envelope, so I bought 500 (five hundred!) for the price of ten at Hallmarks. I also bought my toddler’s favorite pasta mix. Two dozen boxes for next to nothing. Huge bags of salad, chopped vegetables, wine galore ... I was now a disciple of the buy, buy, buy philosophy. En route home, I felt ecstatic, calculating the money I would save, how I would be the clever economist of the family. I was thrilled to be part of the savvy clique. “So what if I buy a big bag of lettuce and half of it goes to waste?” I thought, “it’s still cheaper than buying the ones half that size at Safeway.” My jubilation lasted about five hours. I ate a whole chocolate chip muffin with my afternoon tea, only to feel sick. My preschoolers made an even bigger mess than usual with theirs. Then I started panicking about the remaining muffins going off if we didn’t eat them fast enough, and typically, my husband was away on a business trip for the rest of the week. I took the huge box of envelopes up to our spare room and couldn’t find an empty square foot on the floor to put them. Likewise my fridge couldn’t hold the mass of vegetables. When I stuffed the pasta boxes on top of a precarious pile of gardening equipment in the garage, I suddenly thought of the prospect of my toddler’s fickle taste changing just because I had two dozen boxes of his pasta mix. Sometimes kids just sense things. I looked at the excess strewn around me, wondering what my mother would say about all this waste waiting to happen. “Think of the starving children in Ethiopia...” was her daily lament at dinner. I recalled a phrase from college economics class called diminishing marginal returns. My professor explained, “Imagine you had forty acres of land, one man and a plough to farm it. By increasing the capital allocation, i.e. buying him a horse, you can increase the yield of crops. Buy him a tractor and the yield increases further, but buy him two and you see only a small yield increase, three and it becomes economically unviable. Beyond a certain level, money thrown at a given production process will yield diminishing returns.” I never really got it, but there in my CostCo bloated kitchen, the penny finally dropped. Basically, it’s what my mother taught us from an early age: you can get too much of a good thing, beware of careless abundance. What’s the point of having a fridge clogged with things I don’t need? Less can sometimes mean more. It certainly did when our family shared those two potatoes when I was ten. The sharing of a precious commodity elevated those simple fruits of the earth to something magical. It’s this kind of sharing that I want my children to taste, even here in the land of plenty. For I love this part of California and am here to stay. Meanwhile, I’m checking the CostCo fliers to see if they sell any of those assemble-yourself sheds for the yard, so that I’ve got somewhere to store my boxes of bargains, till it’s time for the yard sale. © Alison van Diggelen

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