Food Fight

For three years I was embroiled in a war with a vichyssoise-lover on the Upper West Side.  I wouldn't know this person if I met him (or her).  But it was a bitter battle.

I learned from another mom at baby swim class (which is really just like a wet cocktail party where grownups balance slippery babies instead of drinks) that Pepperidge Farm makes a really great vichyssoise.  I make a really great vichyssoise--perfected it one day, 19 years ago, when my apartment building was locked down because a sniper named Mordechai Levy was spraying bullets on the street below.  I call it Sniper Vichyssoise, since the margins of the Joy of Cooking I had open at the time is scribbled with notes about the police activity below my window, as well of mention of the first time the NYPD had sent a little robot camera into a dangerous area.  It was an exciting day, capped off with an excitingly delicious vat of vichyssoise.  Who could ask for anything more?

But I digress.  So years later with a kid in tow (and little energy for making vats of soup from scratch) I learn that there's a passable vichyssoise on a grocery store shelf.  I searched for it for a few weeks, finally found it at a store near work, checked it out, and found it to be very very good.  A little white can with the pastoral Pepperidge Farm scene, out of which comes a cylinder of cream-colored paste, to which you mix a can full of milk, and voila! (because you don't have to heat it or chill it if the milk was straight out of the fridge), you have a really good creamy vichyssoise. 

Or rather, you could have it if someone else hadn't beaten you to the Gristedes on Broadway between 90th and 91st.

I would go on a break from work and buy one or two cans.  But one day I showed up and the entire row of vichyssoise was just gone--all the way to the back of the shelf.  Gazpacho to the right, some fish bisque (yuck) to the left, and just this major gap-toothed blank spot.  No vichyssoise at all.

So I'd wander in to Gristedes once a week or so, and if I ever discovered a fully restocked shelf, I'd load up.  Six, seven cans maybe...as many as I could carry on the crowded 1 or 9 train home.  I'd take them all if I could manage it.

You can imagine the next few years, I'm sure.  I load up on vichyssoise, and the shelf sits there with the big vacant spot.  A new shipment comes in, someone beats me to it, does his own loading up, and then the shelf sits empty--with gazpacho warily regarding bisque across the abyss, until another shipment arrives, I show up.  Load up.  Or he  proves to have been there already, and I go home feeling angry. And so on and so forth.  Never just one can.  All or nothing.  All the time.  It hardly mattered if I needed to replenish my own cupboard or not.  It was war.

Eventually the gap on the shelf closed in.  Fish bisque cozied up to gazpacho and I never saw the vichyssoise again.  No cans of it, no empty space where the cans should be.  I'm not even sure if they make it anymore.

Years later, my opponent (must be the same person, right?  who else operates this way?) followed me to Brooklyn and started hording all the French Vanilla Almond Granola from the scoop-your-own-dry-goods area in the health food section of the new Fairway in Red Hook.  Could it be the same guy?  All I know is that it's the same fight, different food.  I've bounded up to the row of plastic containers--baggy tie and plastic bag in hand--ready to just scoop enough to get through the next week, only to find an empty plastic bin with triangles of powder all pressed up into the corners, too many times.  So my only response is to dive in now and declare war once more.   Quick let's get to the French Vanilla Granola bin! I urge the kids, hurrying them through the chilly produce area, past the olive bar, live lobsters, eyeing customers as I pass them, trying to beat them all there, just in case one of them is the granola-guy.  When the bin is full, we stand there shamelessly filling our bag(s).  Sometimes we double bag it to keep anything from leaking.  Ten, twelve dollars worth.  Every time.  Basic survival.  Law of the Battlefield.  Of course if the granola-soldier has already emptied the bin I'm devastated.  Nothing else will do. 

Except, maybe, the Chicken Alfredo Pasta meal at Costco.  My fellow-foodie doesn't seem to have discovered that one.  Yet.