Sometimes it's even worse. Because sometimes I want to buy ice cream.
Ice cream presents a perfect storm of consumer anxiety—an example of The Grocery Store Problem so well-balanced that it is nigh unsolvable.
Here's how it goes. I stand there in the freezer aisle, laden with heavy bags (because this is at the end of the trip), wandering back and forth between the different options.
First instinct: I can buy Ben & Jerry's, the hands-down best tasting ice cream in the freezer aisle.
But Ben & Jerry's is expensive, $4.99 a pint.
Alright, so I can buy the Shaw's brand, Stone Ridge, which is acceptably tasty and much cheaper.
But Stone Ridge comes in a half gallon. If I buy Stone Ridge, I will be eating a half gallon of ice cream, as opposed to a quart, which is twice as much unhealthy food!
So I think to myself “I could get some of those fruit cream pops. They're both cheaper (by the serving) and 'healthier' than a tub of ice cream.” But dammit, they don't taste nearly as good as Fossil Fuel, or even the generic standby Cookies and Cream.
So here we have three major attributes factoring into my Ice Cream Dilemma:
Tasty
Cheap
Small (“healthy”)
If we're trying to optimize this whole business, then of course I'd want to make the choice that meets the best of all three. But Plato teaches us that such an ideal does not really exist (for if it did, surely it would be the ice cream of the gods). So I'll have to settle for some combination of two out of three:
Tasty Cheap
Tasty Small
Cheap Small
And here's where it starts to get philosophical. How can I possibly decide between such sweeping abstractions? Which values matter most? Health, wealth or quality of life? Should I even be buying ice cream in the first place? What good does it do, ultimately?
These are questions for the sages to contend with. Let me just step it back a moment, to a more practical, worldly point of view.
Cheap. On the one hand, since all of my money has been going to pay surprise-sex type overdraft fees at my former bank (Rot in hell Citizen's, you greedy bastards), I am fairly poor at the moment. Since I am an unemployed MFA, I am fairly poor as a rule.
Small. On the other hand, even though the women in my family are blessed with an even-keel metabolism, which keeps my weight within a permanent 10-pound swing, I still generally feel guilty about eating junk and want to accrue other tangible benefits from healthy food.
On the third, mutant hand, I'm here standing in the ice cream aisle because I was driven by a very powerful instinct which wants to MAW DOWN ON SOME DUBLIN MUDSLIDE ummphffff mmphnnggfff tasty.
If you're finding this whole thing complicated and ridiculous, just you wait until we get out of the freezer aisle and try to buy some real food. Then we have to add “quickness” to the list of qualifications. Will whatever I'm buying transform into edible format fast enough to satisfy my terminal impatience with cooking? Do I even posses the skills to turn, say, a bunch of turnips into something edible? (and of course, quickness rarely translates into healthfulness, and if it does, you can bet it ain't cheap)
I hope you didn't expect this post to come to any sort of resolution, meaningful or otherwise. Because the Ice Cream Dilemma has no resolution. I'm still caught in its ineluctable vortex (I'm actually posting this from the freezer aisle).
Still looking for that miracle food which is fast, tasty, healthy, and cheap.*
*Actually, I have found one: my roommate's cooking. Too bad he just left for a monthlong trip to the UK. Bastard.
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