Bedlam in the bread aisle; the superstore domestication of humankind by cart-wielding vigilantes

By drew tschappat

As I imagine it, the easiest way to obtain dinner supplies in the late Pleistocene epoch was simply to find an elderly, preferably infirm, woolly mammoth(1) and bludgeon it to death with a combination of large tree limbs and dense, jagged, killing stones(2). Now, I know what you’re thinking – that in no way, shape or form is killing a woolly mammoth easy. In some respects, you may even consider it borderline suicidal. But I can assure you, friend, that by all accounts, you are quite wrong (or at the very least, epochally misguided).

I am basing this, of course, on the assumed validity of Positive Darwinist Intellectualism(3). Or rather, that as homo sapiens we have evolved far beyond the intellectual capacity of Neanderthals(4) (or so one would hope). Therefore – and without delving into the various semantics of this argument – anything a Neanderthal could do, a homo sapiens should be able to do just as well, if not better. I.E. killing woolly mammoths for dinner.

Okay, sure. You may or may not be trampled to death, gored in the spleen, defecated on, or ingested and dissolved by mammoth stomach acid. But let’s be honest – that is an irrationally pessimistic view to take. A Neanderthal could do it for gosh sakes! Are you telling me you’re not convinced you could outsmart a woolly mammoth?

No? Well, neither am I really. After all, I did also believe I could successfully drive a push kart after watching Cool Runnings when I was 7 – which worked out in the sort of way where I still have a 6-inch scar on my arm from some incorrect steering that sent me promenading through a plane of jagged glass. So yes, I have (seemingly) been wrong in my assumptions before. Even so, the question is posed: would I rather take my chances by corralling an ill-tempered, feral mammoth(5), or drive one block to Wegmans(6) to buy milk and bread? The decision is easy, as merely contemplating such matters sends my taste for Proboscidean blood into a frenzy. Mammoth a la carte, anyone?

Unfortunately, such beasts are extinct and frozen carcasses fit for human consumption are rare(7). As such, I find myself at Wegmans facing the unenviable task of grocery shopping without supervision.

Now I admit, for most people the concept of grocery shopping is not the same vomit-inducing nightmare it is for me. I assume most consumers are able to shop on a weekly basis without a second thought; that they don’t stand in front of the automatic glass doors with the same trepidation as one might have upon facing a snarling-hungry-bloodthirsty lion. However, I do not have the luxury of being "most people."

After a prolonged case of shilly-shallying, I slink through the doors and begin the unholy experience of grocery shopping.

Immediately caught in the counter-clockwise flow of rampaging shopping carts charging and whirling like a pack of stampeding Pamplonian bulls, I quickly find myself tossed into the bread aisle (which is fortunate, as bread is one of three things on my grocery list).

I suppose, by now, you’ve cleverly deduced that my sole motive for purchasing bread is to make grilled cheese sandwiches(8). No surprise, then, that the cheese aisle is the next stop we’ll be making on this dreadfully ill-fated expedition. But what I was saying, before you so rudely let me interrupt, is that I’ve come face to face with a heaping pile of bother here in the bread aisle.

Principally, I am at an utter loss as to which species of bread I should purchase for my grilled cheese sandwiches. Wheat. Country. Oat. Grain. Oat grain. White. Italian. Pumpernickel. French. Rye. Russian(9). Corn. Fuck!

By overdosing me with choices, the supermarket has effectively rendered my ability to make such choices useless. Is there a substantial enough difference between oat and oat grain to affect my grilled cheese experience? Is the 20 minutes I spend contemplating this decision a worthwhile use of my time?

The problem of choice, or abundance of choice, rather, is an even more destructive force in the cheese section. With approximately 5 billion cheeses to choose from, my grilled-cheese selection process implodes on itself. Does it really matter? Isn’t a grilled cheese just a grilled cheese? Did Neanderthals have to deal with this shit?

Ok, do I want the smoked woolly mammoth or the grilled? Do I want lean or fatty? Does this mammoth have too much gristle on it? That other one looks much more tender…

While I admit the convenience of not having to risk our lives to kill mega-fauna in order to eat dinner(10), I can’t help but think that this is not how we were meant to live. The grocery shopping experience is a microcosm of how compartmentalized our lives have become. We have the luxury of choice, in so much as those choices are inconsequential to anything that actually matters.

Take for instance, the act of buying a new car or a new set of clothes. In principle a car is designed to do one thing, and one thing only – get us from Point A to Point B. Clothes are meant to protect us from the elements. But now, due to the over abundance of choice, we choose cars and clothes not because of practicality, but rather due to social status or cultural affluence. We put so much of ourselves into making meaningless decisions like this, we don’t have time to truly appreciate the fact that we are alive.

I might make the best grilled cheese sandwich in the world(11), but is that more satisfying to me than a dead woolly mammoth would be to a starving hunter who had to battle for hours with a creature 10 times his size in order to survive? Which one of us would understand, or appreciate anyway, just what it means to be alive? Despite my superior cognitive capacity(12), I can’t help but think that the Neanderthal would have the edge in this debate.

I’m not saying it’s a tragedy that most of us don’t have to struggle to survive, but rather that without that struggle our appreciation of life is defined differently, to the point where we take it for granted.

I suppose most people don’t get into self-serving existential debates with themselves while grocery shopping(13), but here in the chaos of the bread aisle, it’s all I can think about… that, and woolly mammoth sandwiches.

-Drew Tschappat


1. Or perhaps, a giant, pre-historic sloth for the less fortuitous.
2. Though one could conceivably debate my qualifications for discussing day-to-day life during the Pleistocene.
3. Which, for the sake of this particular discussion, is a theory I randomly made-up on the spot.
4. There are obvious holes in this theory; see Spencer Pratt.
5. As opposed to say, the non-feral, domesticated mammoths that can be found in Canadian petting zoos.
6. For those of you not living in the mid-Atlantic, Wegmans is one of the top grocery chains in the country, having been named “Best Grocery Store” by the Food Network in 2007 as well as being listed as the number one grocery chain by Consumer Reports in both 2006 and 2009.
7. In 1872, The New York Times published an account of a group of French explorers who, venturing toward the North Pole, claimed to have found so many well-preserved mammoth specimens that for a time they "lived entirely on mammoth meat, broiled, roasted and baked."
8. And what I mean by grilled cheese sandwiches, is that I am actually too lazy to grill a sandwich, so it’s really just a cheese sandwich. Sometimes I’m even too lazy to put cheese on the bread. But don’t judge me.
9. Barley, yeast, radiated soil, vodka.
10. Though in light of modern technology, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to kill a mammoth in this day and age. Give me a bazooka and you’ll have 10 mammoth on rye sandwiches coming right up.
11. False.
12. I am aware there are those of you who would debate this, to which I would respond by clubbing you with a stick.
13. Me? Neurotic? Never…