Food, Wonderful Food

I met a businessman in the late 80’s who was making connections with similar business people in the Soviet Union. I assumed that his motives were both patriotic and financially self-serving. He would often go to Russia to meet with his counterparts and often he would bring them here.
Once, he took a Russian lawyer to Safeway to do some shopping. She was quite amazed at the quality and variety of food; high quality fresh meat, five kinds of lettuce, exotic fruit, twenty kinds of bread, etc.
At one point, the businessman stepped away from the shopping cart to fetch something. When he came back she had nearly half-filled the cart with beef and pork. He asked her what she was doing and she told him that today there was such good meat for sale that she had to grab it before it was all gone. He laughed and then explained that it would all be there again tomorrow and the day after.

At Costco the other day I noticed an interesting young man working as a bagger. Actually it would probably be more accurate to call him a boxer. He was most likely African and possible Sudanese. He was tall and thin and very dark with a pattern of decorative welts running across his forehead.
I wondered what it must be like to come from the Sudan or Eritrea or Somalia and find yourself in a building with food literally stacked thirty feet high to the ceiling, surrounded by enormously fat white people pushing hundreds of pounds of cola and macaroni and cheese and fettuccine spaghetti to their monstro cars. It must seem like the strangest world to him. Sometimes it seems like a strange world to me.