Aside from workers and citizens publicly takin’ names and kickin’ ass on the bastard grocery moguls, I have noticed a few other benefits directly related to the grocery workers strike here in Southern California:

1) Unswerving social and political convictions or not, people still gotta eat — so, what could be better than maintaining your ethics AND doing better by your colon whilst doing so? How, you ask? Well, one of the results of the strike is that by honoring the picket lines, and thereby being forced to seek their cannolis elsewhere, people are flocking to smaller, healthier, alternative organic grocery stores (i.e., Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Henry’s Marketplace), as well as food co-ops and local farmer’s markets — places, I might add, in which they might never have stepped a ponderous, puffy, preservative-laden foot, otherwise.

I was in Trader Joe’s a few days ago, and their shelves looked like they had been descended upon by ravenous, tabouli and hummus-seeking locusts. In many places the cupboard was bare-ass bare due to the ever-increasing numbers of first-time shoppers gracing their granola-laden aisles since the strike officially got underway on October 11th. I talked to the manager, and he informed me they were immediately WAY upping their usual weekly orders to accomodate said crossover locusts — and he delivered this information unto me with the highly satisfied and beatific smile of a preacher reaching new converts. Colons would be saved this day, he seemed to be saying.

Hmmm…could it be that perhaps a few of those Count Chocula and deep-fried Twinkies acolytes might even be persuaded to change their wicked, wicked ways? Only time, and their cholesterol and blood sugar levels, will tell.

and

2) On Monday night, my 12 year old daughter was working on a school science project that involved an experiment which required the presence of blue food coloring. Being the domestic slugabed that I admittedly am, I, of course, had NONE. Mother Muffy’s cupboard was bone-dry of the blue-stuff. So, while she carried on with other aspects of her project, my husband and I walked over to the two local pharmacies to see if, by some miracle of the blue god Krishna, they might have food coloring in stock. They did not. So, we came home, and explained the situation to Anne — and told her that under no circumstances would we cross the picket line at either Von’s or Albertson’s (the only two grocery stores on the island) — even if it meant heading off into the wild, blue yonder…well, without any of the blue.

We were in a conundrum, to be sure. And then it hit me: Wait a minute, goddamnit — wait just one no-muff-is-an-island minute. What would someone in our shoes have done 30 or 50 or even a 100 years ago?

They would have turned to their neighbor for assistance, of course — a neighbor whom they actually knew, and with whom they would have undoubtedly interacted on a regular basis… and perhaps even felt great affection towards. In the times in which we live, not only are we frequently hesistant about turning to a neighbor for help, it usually doesn’t even occur to us to do so in the first place — as we probably have NO goddamned idea who our neighbor even is. We are so far from any notion — much less any reality — of true community. And what a damned shame it is.

So, being that we just moved out here to the island two months ago, we don’t yet know our neighbors — and by virtue of that, and by the sheer necessity of my daughter’s scientific situation, we decided to do a little something about it.

That’s right, kids — we strode next door, knocked on the door, introduced ourselves…and asked if we might borrow their bottle of blue food coloring for about an hour.

The elderly lady, Barbara, was positively DELIGHTED to find us on her doorstep — and not only did she lend us the blue food coloring we required, as a gesture of welcoming she handed us a little plastic tub of cherry tomatoes she had picked off her very own vines that morning…”the last of what was a glorious crop…” she told us.

After hearing her wax proud and poetic about her grandson, who writes for the paper here, we offered to bring in her garbage cans on Fridays after the weekly pick-up (as she has a difficult time doing so herself), gave her our contact information, thanked her profusely, said good-bye, and turned to leave.

But, before closing the door and returning to Pat Sajak — probably the closest thing she has to a man around the house since the death of her husband — she smiled sweetly, waved a surprisingly still-graceful hand in the air at us, and called out, “Welcome to the neighborhood! And if you ever need anything — anything at all — don’t hesitate to come ask. After all, what are neighbors for?”

What for, indeed.