In Praise of Modern Amenities

How great are supermarkets?

Today I decided that I wanted a sandwich for lunch. A real sandwich. As in, not just some peanut butter slapped between two pieces of boring, preservative-enriched sliced bread, but something with substance. Something with meat and cheese and vegetables, crispy from the oven. Something on an Ace Bakery demi-baguette.

So I went to the supermarket to get what was needed.

Upon entering, I thought to myself “This is so CONVENIENT. Everything I need is RIGHT HERE!”

Think about it.

For my sandwich I purchased not only a demi-baguette, but also some spicy Genoa salami, provolone cheese, sprouts, dijon mustard, tomatoes, mushrooms and garlic-infused olive oil.

Had I not had a supermarket at which I could purchase these items, I would have had a lot of work on my hands.

After having grown the wheat, ground the wheat, combined my flour with whatever other ingredients make bread, I would have baked it. Most likely in a fire of some sort, seeing as if I don’t have access to a supermarket, it’s doubtful that I have access to a conventional oven.

While the bread was baking I would have meandered out to my garden to grab some tomatoes and mushrooms, although I’m betting that I would actually have had to find the mushrooms in the forest as opposed to in my garden, seeing as I doubt that they contain enough nutrients to warrant giving up the time and the space to actually grow them myself. But who knows, maybe I’m a frivolous pioneer woman.

Provided both items were to be found in my garden, and ripe enough to eat at that, I would have taken them inside, rinsed them off in a bucket of water my fifth son had recently fetched from the well, chopped them up, set them aside and proceeded to the smoking shed to grab some salami, which may or may not have actually been salami, and almost definitely would not have been Genoa salami, what with me being a pioneer woman, living in the relative seclusion of the Canadian wilderness, and most likely never even having heard of “Genoa”, never mind having tasted their particular brand of salami.

So I’m in the smoke shed, looking for the meat I want; the meat that came from the pig I slaughtered a few weeks back (let’s go with a few weeks… I have no idea how long it takes to smoke meat), butchered with my own bare hands (well, hopefully I at least had a knife or something to aid in the process), salted, spiced (apparently I AM frivolous), stuffed into the intestine of said-pig and hung in the shed to smoke.

We’re still missing the cheese, which probably wasn’t provolone, although I have no idea what makes provolone different than other cheeses so let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it was. Whatever. This cheese I made from the milk of my cow using a process with which, as a pioneer, I was intimately familiar but actually not because I am not, as I write this, actually a pioneer of any kind and have never, actually, made my own cheese.

The process of making a sandwich just took me several months.

So, having the luxury of living in a developed country in the twenty-first century, I’ve managed to neatly avoid the trouble of producing my own food stuffs and therefore saved myself considerable time and hardship.

It’s a good thing too, seeing as I have no idea where or how sprouts are grown, never mind what the heck constitutes “Dijon mustard”.



Editor’s Note: I’ve deliberately left out the garlic-infused olive oil from the receipe of pioneer me because I’m 99.9% sure that, in this role, I’ve never seen, heard of or tasted an olive. I’m guessing butter would have done the trick. Butter without garlic, because that’s probably saved for strictly medicinal use.