The Deli Diaries, pt 3

Cole slaw conspiracies, dumpster crime, and cramps

The lady who wants me to weigh her cole slaw before I put the lid on is a regular. It’s her little moment of the day when she gets to Batman her personal life, to right the wrongs of the world and the injustices of the system. It’s funny and sad at the same time: funny because I get to imagine all the other micro-conspiracies that she fights (Big Shampoo doesn’t want you to get that last two percent out of the bottle), the names she has of her subreddit forums (r/shampoobottlehacks) , and the advice she gives out on her podcast (Getting Your Fair Share with Debbie) but also sad because this kind of person is always going to feel cheated and taken advantage of no matter how she is treated—she’ll never be at peace with the world. It’s hard not to laugh when she’s watching me spoon her slaw into the container—“Scoop it from the top!” she demands, wanting to avoid the slaw juices that come from bottom scoops (that’s where the extra weight comes in), but it’s also a little sad thinking of her eating it alone in her car in the parking lot. I think she’s eating it in her car because she also always wants a fork. Or maybe she has her own fork but is accumulating a bunch of free ones—that’s how she’s going to get over on us. Then she drives back to her job denying insurance claims from seniors with cancer—everyone else does it online, but she still uses hard copies so she can slam down the giant rubber DENIED stamp.

Keep America Beautiful

Are you old enough to remember Iron Eyes Cody, the Native American on commercials about littering? With the solitary tear when he saw garbage on the side of the highway, perfected by Denzel Washington in the movie Glory, after which it was always known as “The Glory Tear?” Fun fact: Iron Eyes Cody was Italian. When I looked out upon the waste of the supermarket dumpsters, I felt that same emotion the fake Native fake-felt for the camera.

Trust me, if there was a good way to these dumpsters I would tell my activist friends who could literally feed dozens if not a hundred people Food Not Bombs style with what just this one store throws out on a random weekday. What about every store in the greater LA area? Of course, this is corporate policy: we can’t afford to give food away, not even to our employees, but we throw it out technically before it goes bad. And I asked. In my own way.

“Is there another way to get back here?” I asked. “Like, if the incoming pallets are blocking our hallway and I can’t get out with the trash cart?”

“No. And it’s really easy to lock yourself out,” my coworker told me, as we left on a trash run. We walked by a bin that was full of the section of my biggest temptations from our bakery: the single-serve cheesecake slices, the plastic chubs of finger-thick cookies, and the pies. “I locked myself out here when I was new. I didn’t have anyone’s number yet. You can’t get out to public property from here. There’s a huge spiky fence. I had to call the store number and explain to the customer service where I was. She was like, ‘you can’t get out there unless you’re an employee,’ and I was like, ‘that’s what happened, I locked myself out.’”

America! Where throwing away food is legal, but going into the trash bins to retrieve it is a crime.

Cake as Currency

Thirty years ago, I worked at a café in the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco called Just Desserts. We sold more pastries than anything but really made our money selling sheet cakes to corporate downtown, pre-tech era: divorce lawyers, insurance companies, and real estate litigators. We sold a lot of regular cakes, whole and slices, as well. We sold day-old cakes, but if they didn’t sell day-old, we could either take them home or throw them out. There was a local anarchist who stopped by on his bicycle a minute after close every day with a clean garbage bag and one of my coworkers dumped all the unsold pastries in there, under the assumption he was feeding the unhoused. I guess he was.

The cakes were heavy and unwieldy. But I used them like cryptocurrency all over town. I gave them to bartenders and barbers. I took them to local writers in exchange for them helping with manuscripts. I found an indie theater whose counter people loved our cakes who let me in free to movies if I brought a cake—I did this so many times that I was called Cake Guy a few times from cars. I made $200 a week, take home, back when my rent was $400, but I stretched my cake-currency as far as I could take it.

The Cramps! but sadly, not the band

Something different hurts every morning after a shift. Fortunately, the worst of them, the arch pain, has passed—if that had continued, I would have quit. This morning, I woke up early with a hamstring cramp that was in such a weird part of the muscle I couldn’t stretch it out. And before I get 100 emails telling me to “eat a banana!” this is a hydration and overuse issue—no one is getting cramps from a lack of potassium unless they are severely malnourished at an anorexic-type level—I eat plenty of bananas. This cramp was screaming at me to do something while my brain was still trying to finish a dream I was having. People say that they “listen to their body” but mine is like having two kids in a car on a road trip: constant arguments.