Like many people in the world, the last several minutes on the clock at my job can yield unexpected craziness. Between clearing out dishes, making last minute sandwiches or coffee drinks, telling the closing crew what to do, and counting out the register I tend to get a little distracted. Occasionally the universe likes to throw me a curve ball during those distracted, hurried and harried moments. This was one such occasion. I had actually finished things in a relatively timely manner, and somehow managed to jot down a list of tasks for my closer to accomplish earlier that day, and as the clock waned from 3 to 3:30 I was optimistically looking forward to actually clocking out on time.
3:25 PM
Then I saw him.
He sauntered up to the counter slowly, not making eye contact with me or offering any greeting whatsoever but gazing solely at our sandwich menu with a slow but deliberate attentiveness. I make a concerted effort to not rush our customers into ordering something but I saw in his facial expression a certain confusion that gave me cause to ask how I could help him.
3:28 PM
Do you remember the last scene of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" When the brick wall is knocked down, and we finally see "Toon Town" All of nature in Toon Town sings, the Sun bounces around in the sky while birds flit about swaying elm and oak trees...that's what it looked like outside the store as He casually rested his elbow on the counter and leaned in to ask me a serious question.
"How organic is your turkey, and how can you proof it?"
I don't know how I caught on to this, maybe it was something in his eyes, but I somehow knew this question wasn't designed to receive information....but rather as a pretense under which I could be informed by his superior knowledge. It was at this point that I knew I was in trouble, so I calmly replied that our 100% organic Turkey came from a small farm in Iowa and bore the requisite stamp from the USDA certifying it's "organic-ocity". I had made a terrible mistake!
He rolled his eyes, smirked, rocked back on his heels, and chuckling to himself said:
"Well, almost anything can be called organic when all you have to do is pay to get it certified....what else can you tell me about it? Do you have any information about the farm?"
I was suddenly, existentially, transcendentally, and inconveniently divided into three complete persona's bearing different replies. Customer service Matt just wanted this poor guy to go home happy, whether he ordered something or not...and he really wanted to clock out and ride his bike home in the cartoon-esque amazing sunshine.
Sarcastic Matt really wanted to enjoy these few moment of being stuck back in the deli by parading the euphoric lifestyle of Big Tom the turkey in his Utopian Organic farm in Iowa: Big Tom has satellite TV piped into his yurt so he can chill out and watch independent movies, and CSPAN to his massive turkey heart's content. The food upon which he thrives is hand prepared for him by a rotation of different international Chefs skilled in all the culinary traditions of the world. Come mating season, the most supple beautiful female turkeys are paraded in front of him. At the zenith of this opulence he is led into a warm room playing Beethoven where he is decapitated, plucked...gutted, stamped, frozen and shrink wrapped for convenient storage. Sarcastic Matt tends to make my life worse, so while I smiled at his input I decided that it wasn't in my best interest.Then "Rhetorical Matt" stepped into the ring.
"Well Sir....what he have here is actually a conflict of epistemology. Since knowledge can only be revealed from a capable source, not generated from a vacuum, we actually have absolutely no way of guaranteeing that anything is what it says it is unless it is inspected, and then certified by some sort of objective (or third) party committed to serving public good. After all, who is to say that the information you have is reliable? If the certification is faulty, how could possibly turn then to the farm itself for comfort when after all, they are selling the turkey in the first place. You see, that's called a biased perspective, because the farm would ultimately be motivated financially to boast about their product, they could say anything they wanted to to get you to buy it."
It was a humbling moment for me, either wanting ignore this guy, make fun of his beliefs and values, or destroy him in a debate. I honestly found myself wondering what was wrong with both of us. His self-righteousness in regards to food had stirred the beast of my self-righteousness regarding everything. I can't say that there weren't any hidden barbs in my comments, because there certainly were, but I do have to say that people get a little weird, and kind of annoying when they take the "you are what you eat" thing too seriously. I mean....this guy, he talked at me for about 10 minutes (which is a long time in food service) and left without buying anything at all! I guess the upside for him was that he was sticking it to the man somehow....perhaps we should charge a minimal consultation fee when people only want to talk about what we cook rather than eat it, because it seems to happen a lot.
The USDA guarantees that no Hippies, or turkeys were harmed in the making of this post....because that's what he paid us to say.
No comments:
Post a Comment