Big Sugar Land Grabs

            What if anyone that harms anyone, whether under government orders or not, is insane? What if the work of a soldier at war or of someone pulling the switch on the electric chair is all the result of the manipulation of the mentally ill?

            I’ve started changing my arm position when strumming my guitar. For years I’ve rested my elbow on top of the guitar to strum but recently I’m trying to hook my arm as much as possible around the bottom of my guitar. It feels more natural but it takes some getting used to.

            I worked on memorizing “Le Sixieme Sens” by Serge Gainsbourg. It’s sung by Juliette Greco, whom Jean-Paul Sartre called “the muse of existentialism”. The verses list various things that the singer senses with her five senses, as she and her lover get ready to go out. My translation of the chorus goes, “These are all of life’s five senses / The sixth sense tells me that it’s ended.”

            The food bank line-up was relatively short, with maybe about fifteen people ahead of me. The guy directly in front of me was relaxing in a folding chair that he’d brought along, though not the kind of light collapsible canvas chair that one would normally see but a heavy folding metal chair that one might find in a school gym for assemblies. It fit in his cart though. A chair wouldn’t do me much good in the food bank line-u because I'd keep having to get up and move away to avoid second hand smoke.

            After about twenty minutes a woman who’s at the food bank ever Saturday told me that she was ahead of me. Since I hadn’t seen her when I'd arrived I questioned her claim but when I asked the guy in the chair he confirmed that she was next in line. I guess she’d been inside warming up.

            It wasn’t as cold as the week before and I was able to read without putting my gloves on. Suddenly I felt something wet hit the back of my head. I looked up and realized that I was directly under the pigeons that roost above the entrance to 1501 Queen. I put my hand back there and then brought it in front of me to see if there was bird shit but there wasn’t. The guy who’d just come up to take the spot behind me commented that it was probably a raindrop. I looked up and saw that there weren’t many clouds but I guess it was possible that one might have fallen. Maybe too there was water from melted snow up where the pigeons were and one of them splashed in it.

            The guy behind me lit a cigarette and so I stepped away. I read a chapter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The story started getting more interesting after the first hundred pages, when the monster began relating to Frankenstein the story of his life after being abandoned by his creator. If he could really learn to speak and read simply from observing and hearing through a hole an educated family in a cottage communicate with one another for a year, this creature would be the greatest genius that every walked the Earth. It reminds me of how Tarzan teaches himself to read and write as a boy by studying an illustrated dictionary. The case of Tarzan's self-education is more plausible but still not probable.

            The monster, after observing these cottagers to be exceptionally kind human beings finally decides to reveal himself to them. Their horrified and violent reaction convinces him that even the best of humanity would never accept him. Later when he tries to communicate with a child, thinking that the innocent would not react violently to him, he finds himself strangling the boy to death to stifle his screams. The boy turns out to have been the brother of his creator.

            The point that I’ve reached in the book is just after the monster has asked Victor Frankenstein to make him a mate so that he and she can go far away and never have to make contact with humanity again. Victor reluctantly agrees and he is currently travelling to England to consult with some philosophers that can help him with the project. I can’t think of how a philosopher would help with such an endeavour but we’ll see. Perhaps this comes from the fact that Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin was considered one of the greatest philosophers of his day.

            Mo was passing and stopped to chat. He said that he might come back when the line-up thins out. He said that there is no waiting in the early afternoon and one gets just as much food. I'm sceptical about that last claim. He told me that he just bought a Piaggio scooter and that he can really whip around and take it on the highway too. I asked him about his eyesight because I knew that he’d recently had two operations on one eye and was waiting for surgery on the other. He said that he was going for surgery next month but I seem to recall that he said the same thing six months ago.

            He told me that this recent holiday season was his first without his parents. He had to remind me that both his parents had died last year. I asked if he had brothers and sisters and he said that he did but they don’t keep in touch. He said that now that his parents are gone he can just relax and do his own thing.

            Mo reached into his bag and tried to give me a can of Laker lager but I turned him down because it’s not my brand and I already have gifted beer that’s taking up space in my fridge and that I’ll never drink. He told me that I was insulting him by not taking the gift and also embarrassing him in front of the other people in the line-up. I told him that I'd meant no insult. I guess in retrospect I could have taken the beer. If it had been a Creemore I would have. He didn’t really act like he’d been offended though and he gave me an amiable goodbye when he left.

            I had to pee but by the time Mo left it was almost 10:30 and since I figured the line would be moving soon I didn’t bother to go downstairs to see if they would give me the fob for the washroom.

            The man behind me was one of those people who never run out of things to talk about and the elderly woman behind him seemed to enjoy the conversation. He told her that the one thing that he can’t stand is seeing a woman abused. I’m always suspicious of people that make such declarations because they tend to look like potential abusers to me. He said that there’s a couple in his building that fake domestic violence with each other just to get at other tenants. The conversation moved to Toronto cops getting away with murder and then he started talking about martial arts. He seemed to be saying that Chinese martial arts came from acrobatics but it’s sort of the other way around in that in modern times a lot of kung fu has become theatrical and performance based and has very little to do with self defence.

            The line started moving at around 10:40. As we got closer to the front, Valdene the manager was having a cigarette across the sidewalk from the door. The guy behind me said to her, “You’re looking great!” She said, “Thanks!” Then he turned to me, looked at the coffee he was holding and asked, “What’s in this drink?"

            My helper at the shelves was the older Hungarian lady, Marlena. There were still lots of bags of Kuna Pops, syrups, mixes and packages of instant oatmeal, none of which I wanted. Since I’m still trying to get through that big Christmas turkey I got from the food bank I haven’t been opening a lot of cans lately so I didn’t take any beans or soups either. There was lots of cereal but mostly Cheerios, which is a little too light and airy for my breakfast needs.

I only took four items from all of the shelves. The first was a can of Blue Dragon light coconut milk. I haven’t seen this brand in any of the supermarkets that I go to. The can says that it’s made from water and coconut but in Ireland the same product is listed as containing a stabilizer and an emulsifier. The Blue Dragon website refers to their unnamed but “glorious” founder who started the company thirty years ago. The coconuts come from Thailand but the product is made by AB World Foods Ltd, which is owned by Associated British Foods, which is the second largest sugar and baker’s yeast manufacturer in the world, and which was founded by Canadian businessman, Willard Garfield Weston. The company has been criticized by Oxfam for making land grabs in South Africa and forcing farmers off their land to make way for large sugar cane plantations. Sugar plantations grab more land than any other agricultural industry. The company’s response to the criticism is that before there was government legislation to do so ABF voluntarily gave more cane land away to Black farmers than any other sugar company and they have programs in place to assist farmers in maintaining sustainable farms. Oxfam’s reply was that ABF does not have a zero tolerance policy towards land grabs, and until they do they are part of the problem.

The second product was something I’d never come across before: chocolate date spread. The dates come from Iran and company is Ariana. When I look up Ariana Dates I get pages and pages of articles about whom Ariana Grande is dating. It’s an unfortunate company name if no one can find you. It’s not as bad as my name is for web searches though. I finally racked down Ariana Dates by searching for “Ariana Date Spread”. Their website claims that recent research shows that dates have an antigenotoxic quality that helps reduce DNA damage. Canada imposed severe sanctions against imports from Iran in 2013 but lifted a lot of them in 2016. We seem to import a lot of dates from Persia now. The chocolate-date spread is actually quite tasty, plus there’s no sugar as it's sweetened only with dates.

The third item was a 215 ml jar of St Dalfour wild pink pacific salmon with vegetables. St Dalfour is a French company that tells the history of its name on its website. During WWI there was a wine maker named Dalfour who, like many during sugar shortages, used grape must to make a sugar substitute. Grape must is the first stage of the wine making process and has a high glucose content. The Dalfour family had passed their must recipe down through generations but when this Dalfour shared his recipe with his neighbour, Madame Kistner, she loved it so much she declared him a saint. She used his must to make fruit spreads that she named after him as “Saint Dalfour”. In the mid 80s a businessman approached Madame Kistner’s husband about marketing the product and four years later the company launched. The health craze of the 90s and the lack of cane sugar in the product made it a popular health food item. After all that, salmon and vegetables seem pretty far outside of their specialty range, but we’ll see. I wonder if the original Dalfour family got a penny out of all this success. 

The least exotic thing I grabbed was a can of refried beans.

Angie’s section had a bag of milk that she said was 1% so I took that. She gave me a 650-gram container of cherry yogourt, three eggs and three individually wrapped sections of solid margarine. Then she whispered, “Do you want a frozen ham?” She handed me a Wagener’s smoked ham. It said on the label that it was for cooking but it said elsewhere that it was fully cooked. So why is it for cooking if it’s fully cooked? The Wagener’s website says it’s ready to serve so I guess cooking the ham is just an enhancement rather than a necessity.

Sylvia offered me a 4.54 kg bag of potatoes. I still had some potatoes that she’d given me just before Christmas but those were old potatoes that had been re-bagged and they were often full of spots that had to be cut away. This was a sealed container so the chances were better that the spuds were of a higher quality, so I said, “Why not?” I turned down carrots and onions because I have some but I accepted a cauliflower and four tomatoes. I ended up having to throw away three of the tomatoes though because they were too soft.

It was nice to get a ham. I assume that this frozen ham was left over from the holidays and that it was the alternative choice for those that didn’t want a turkey. Wagener’s hams tend to show up at the food bank during the Christmas and Easter seasons. The fancy red woven bags that we got with the Wagener logo on them must have all been part of a large donation from Wagener’s.

After the food bank I went home but the knot in the handles of the recyclable bag that I’d looped over my handlebar came loose outside my door. This caused one of my eggs to crack enough to show yellow but not enough to leak. I decided I would use that one to make a quick mayonnaise for a turkey sandwich at lunchtime, but first I headed back out to No Frills. I bought a pint of blueberries and three bags of black sable grapes. These grapes taste more like grape Kool-Aid than any grapes I’ve ever had. At last human nature has found a way to make nature imitate the imitation of nature. I can’t wait till they breed a lemon tree that grows lemons that taste like lemon meringue pie.

I got two 200-gram bags of Nature Source almonds that at $2.88 each seemed like a good deal for almonds. One was tamari flavoured and the other had almonds mixed with chocolate chunks and salted caramel. I also picked up a frozen apple pie and some strawberry Greek yogourt.

When I got home I found that the container of blueberries had opened up inside my backpack and so I had to remove everything in order to pick out the loose berries one by one.

I didn’t have to go out to the liquor store because I still had four cans of Creemore left over from the case I’d bought the weekend before. They would last me through till next weekend.

I used the yolk of my broken egg to make mayonnaise with tarragon vinegar, olive oil, Dijon and salt. I used it in a turkey sandwich on a triangle bun. I should have bought a lemon for the mayo and I should have let it sit longer in the fridge.

I had more turkey for dinner with a beer that night and watched two episodes of South Park.

Spoiler alert!
            The first story was a continuation of the previous one about Manbearpig, which is still savagely destroying South Park. The boys are in jail because the police think the killings were school shootings committed by them. They’re guard is playing Red Dead Redemption and so the boys break out of jail by bribing him with information about how to get ahead in the game. Satan is still hanging around South Park and so the boys ask him for help. He asks why he should help them and they remind him that humanity is doing so much of his work these days and so he kind of owes them. He thinks that makes sense and so he Satan attacks Manbearpig. But Manbearpig wins and kills Satan. We see the boys crying over Satan’s dead body as his spirit rises up as an angel and ascends to heaven. Stan goes to his father and tries to convince Randy that Manbearpig is real, but Randy says, “You sound just like your grandpa! He’s been talking about Manbearpig coming since I was 14!” Suddenly Stan is starting understand what conjured up Manbearpig. He goes to the retirement home and confronts his grandfather. Grandpa admits that in the 90s he and the other seniors made a deal with Manbearpig to sacrifice South Park in exchange for sports cars and gourmet ice cream. They explain that they thought they’d be dead by the time Manbearpig came to collect. Stan says, “And you didn’t give two shits what it would mean for your grandchildren?” “I didn’t think I’d have grandkids! I didn’t even want children! That’s why I always came on gramgram’s tits! But then one night I’m having sex with your grandma and she sticks her finger in my ass and I came inside her like that! And that’s basically why you’re here!” Stan gets the details of how the deal happened. On behalf of South Park Stan makes an appointment to meet with Manbearpig and his lawyer to renegotiate the deal. Manbearpig says he doesn’t want the cars or the ice cream back but he wants South Park to stop eating soy sauce and to give up playing Red Dead Redemption. The town refuses to give up the game and so the deal that Stan works out is that Manbearpig has the rights to the lives of children in developing countries and he will stay away from South Park for five more years but after that he will return and the carnage will be a thousand fold.

In the second story Cartman is talking to a therapist about how he can’t deal with people anymore because they suck. The only thing he can trust is his phone but everybody else tries to keep him away from it. The therapist tells him that he has anxiety, which is an excuse to be lazy and lame to everyone. Cartman comes across a perfect product for people like him. It’s a soundproof box one puts over one’s head to shut out sensory interruptions and allow one to have quality time alone with one’s phone. Cartman begins promoting the Buddha Box to others until everyone in town is using it and ignoring each other. PC Principal and Vice Principal Strongwoman are so stressed from raising their PC baby quintuplets that they start using the box as well, but as soon as they do the babies wander off by themselves. They first go to a bar and protest the politically incorrect names of drinks, so the bartender takes them off the menu. Then the PC babies go and cry at the construction site of a new viaduct. They are mad because it’s being financed by a state rather than a county institution. The state had refused to finance a proposed program on race relation education the PC babies see it as hypocritical. Next the PC babies end up at a recording studio because a record executive thinks they have the next big sound and so he cuts a record of them crying and banging on instruments. The song is called “Waaah!” and it’s about the injustice of white people in dreadlocks. When the parents of the PC babies realize their kids are missing they hear them on the radio. They find out that their children had their first protests but they’d missed it. They are the only ones that stop using the Buddha box and become attentive parents.