We ran out of toilet paper this morning, somewhat unexpectantly. I suppose that you don’t normally anticipate a TP shortage—instead, one day, you reach the last square and you’re left with nothing but a cylindrical piece of cardboard. Usually, though, you have some sense that you’re nearing the end of the backup supply of rolls in the closet and you can make the necessary arrangements to restock. But when I opened the door this morning to retrieve a new one, I was dismayed to find nothing but the empty plastic wrap that once held the extra TP.
I shrugged and figured I’d deal with it when I got home from work, which of course I forgot about until I sat down on the toilet this afternoon and—damn it! We’re out of toilet paper!
Now I don’t normally shop at the market up the street—it’s pretty gross—but sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Not anticipating a trip to the real grocery store for a few days, I headed to the nearby market for a holdover supply of TP.
It’s one of those places with cigarette ads plastered across the steel-barred windows. Inside, the shop is dimly lit and products of dubious age and quality line the shelves. Nothing is clearly marked or priced and the floors may never have met a mop. There is a meat counter; it contains pig’s hooves and giant knuckles and sausage links.
The smell is the first thing that hits you when you enter. It’s a smell I associate with dirty animal carcass—I’ve only ever noticed it in places with meat counters—and one with which I was once intimately familiar. You see, when I first moved to Portland, I took a part-time deli job at a local grocery store. At closing time, I’d wrap up the leftovers and store them in the walk-in fridge in the meat department, where they would sit overnight until the day person retrieved them in the morning.
Putting the food away was by far the worst part of the gig. I’d wheel the leftovers into the walk-in and stack the dishes in a cart. Around me, giant hunks of dead animal hung from the ceiling, dripping an obstacle course of blood puddles for me to navigate. Sausage links dangled above the leftover food cart. It was too cold in that walk-in to detect much of a stench, but as soon as I’d leave it behind for the warmer air of the meat department I would smell it. Dead, bloody, ground, chopped up, decaying animal. I lasted about six months at that job.
The grossness of meat has been on my mind a lot lately. I’m reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and today I reached the section about what’s in the beef. First of all, let me say this: I do not eat meat often, but I am also not a full-fledged vegetarian, considering that I bend the rules when I visit my family, and have been known to order a rare T-bone with my uncles on various occasions. Plus, I’ve spent the vast majority of my 24 years eating meat of all cuts and species. These days, though, I don’t eat it often—maybe two or three times a year—and after reading this book I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to fully enjoy it again.
Take this story, about a six-year-old boy infected with E. coli from tainted hamburger meat: “His illness began with abdominal cramps that seemed as severe as labor pains… Doctors frantically tried to save Alex’s life, drilling holes in his skull to relieve pressure… Toward the end, Alex suffered hallucinations and dementia, no longer recognizing his mother or father. Portions of his brain had been liquefied.” He died five days after the cramps began.
Of course, this is one severe case of a very rare disease, but the conditions in the meat processing factories are disgusting, favoring speed and productivity over food or employee safety. Workers lose limbs and lives; the corporations do their best to avoid responsibility. I felt queasy on the bus this morning—and not just from motion sickness—after reading about the injuries workers had suffered and how their employers hired doctors to downplay the severity of the problems, often leading to lifelong disabilities from letting them go untreated.
According to Schlosser, cows are given feed made from pigs and horses and cattle blood, and FDA regulations allow cows to be fed chicken that have been fed cows. Cows eat grass, people! They’re ruminants! Not to mention that the speed of the conveyor belts at these factories is so quick that at one plant, manure from the insides of cows reportedly spilled out during the processing of one fifth of the cattle. In other words, these places are breeding grounds for disease, and natch, the industry continues to experience less and less oversight and regulations the more it beefs up—har har—the campaigns of its Republican allies.
Hmm. I started this post to talk about running out of TP and have somehow ended up on a PETA-esque diatribe. I guess the moral of the story is this: buy organic grass-fed beef and always keep an eye on your toilet paper supply.
If you haven’t already seen these:
The Meatrix I
The Meatrix II
The Meatrix II.V
PS, Sorry if I ruined your dinner.
14 responses so far ↓
1 Lynn // Jun 26, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Man, I am starting to feel queasy. But when I tried to be vegetarian (well semi-veg, since I can’t do without fish), I just wouldn’t eat. I couldn’t come up with any ideas of things to make. I don’t really enjoy cooking and most restaurants have never heard of vegetarian meals. So, I just went back to the rest of the herd. But that story about that kid made me really ill.
Lynn
2 michael5000 // Jun 26, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Do people still eat meat?
I have this dreamlike memory from when I was in college and working graveyard shift at a convenience store. It was about 3:30 a.m., and out of the front window I saw a guy just sprinting towards the store for all he was worth. He burst in the front door, RAN to the non-food section, grabbed a roll of toilet paper, and literally threw some money at me as he sprinted back out into the parking lot and back towards, presumably, home.
He never said a word, but the whole encounter left very little to the imagination.
3 Boo // Jun 26, 2007 at 7:18 pm
You absolutely made dinner all the better for me. I had it with my local veggie friend. It was so good. And for the first time we actually discussed why she is vegetarian (reformed vegan). (After eight years of friendship it was bound to come up.)
She has an emotional problem with eating things that suckle their young. I would eat a baby if I was hungry enough and I admit that. But the weird part is that I prefer not to eat meat as it hurts to digest and she craves it still. So we both sit much like you, mostly veggie but for different reasons.
When I tell her about this I think she will have an easier time with those cravings.
Your meat locker job! Icky. And the boy. Around here a baby died of e-coli poisoning and there were articles about how to avoid it in the newspaper last summer. Not supposed to eat raw hamburger.
But my dad and his sisters insist that eating that raw hamburger is a German cultural delicacy of sorts and had been doing it safely for years. He said he used to feed it to us when we were babies because it was easy to chew. And other older people also have corroborated that they ate raw hamburger too.
I have to suspect that things have gotten worse in the production of beef if that is true. There would have been so many more deaths. Or anyway, it seems like there must have been.
Pig Knuckle Bodega . . . now there is a great setting for something.
4 Laura // Jun 26, 2007 at 7:18 pm
The most compelling evidence I’ve seen lately to switch to a meat-free diet is the strong correlation between any number of diseases and having more than 10% animal product in your diet. That, and that per calorie, the only thing meat has more of in comparison to fruits, vegetables and grains is fat and cholesterol. Animal products unfortunately are ridden with disease, and I don’t have the means or desire to ensure that the meat I eat has been well-fed and organically raised.
5 TimsHead // Jun 27, 2007 at 2:37 am
I’ve read Fast Food Nation — it was our book for campuswide reading a couple of years ago — and it was indeed fascinating. And depressing. I have avoided fast-food burger joints ever since.
6 Truly // Jun 27, 2007 at 2:41 am
YUCK!!!! You know that chicken that’s on my Xanga now? That’s a chicken that was fed steroids to make it big and fat for the store; they get all deformed and nasty.
I am a more liberal meat-eater than you, but I still maintain a veggie-based diet. When we can afford it, we eat meat 1 night a week; fish 2 times a week. I say “when we can afford it” because I refuse to buy conventionally-rased meat or deli slices with lots of weird chemicals in them. Buying an organic, free range little chicken is what I like to do. We can eat some, freeze some, and make broth for soups and stuff. But buying healthy meat is also really expensive, and not always an option. I’ll also take venison from friends or family that hunt; it freezes nice and makes a mean stirfry with green peppers and hoisin. But most nights, its legumes, tofu and veggies. Which are DELICIOUS enough that I never miss meat when we don’t have it.
Another gross thing is the amount of babies born with genital defects due to all the hormones in our meat and dairy; I am also a fan of organic milk, eggs and cheese. I don’t care if its more – we’ll eat less and better. I’d rather be spending money on good eats than chemo.
7 thinlizzy17 // Jun 27, 2007 at 4:37 am
I had a hard time eating lots of stuff after I read Fast Food Nation.
I didn’t eat meat for several years. I’m eating meat again, although only meat whose origin I know. Truth be told, I’d rather eat fruits and veg and nuts anyway. It’s just what I like.
I have no similar standards for toilet paper. My only real requirement is that it’s present when I need it.
8 Lena // Jun 27, 2007 at 8:30 am
I’m never reading your blog over breakfast again.
9 Raining Heart (Phoebe) // Jun 27, 2007 at 11:06 am
I’ve been in stores like that and TP is about the only safe thing to buy there!
10 Jane // Jun 27, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Read Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats for a great fictional take on the American meat industry – funny book, serious subject!
11 Gracebug // Jun 27, 2007 at 1:14 pm
I read a book (fiction) years ago by Robin Cook about a kid that gets EColi and has her insides liquify while they are trying to figure out what’s wrong with her. Shortly after that, I read The Jungle. Needless to say, it put me off processed meat completely. I still eat meat, but not “processed” – meaning no sausage, lunch meats, chicken nuggets, etc. And I prefer to have my meat ground from sirloin while I’m standing at the meat counter, though now that several years have gone by I am more and more lax about buying packaged ground beef once in a while when I’m making spaghetti.
By the By, a trick I learned the hard way – living in a large, sometimes toilet-paper-irresponsible household – hide the last roll somewhere when you first get the package. Or put it aside anyway. When you go for that empty package, you’ll have an emergency supply to keep you out of ghetto-mart.
12 Natalie B // Jun 27, 2007 at 6:01 pm
I only eat local meat now. I had a conversation with my husband and we decided that even if it was more expensive, we’d just eat meat less often to balance it out. Now I know exactly where my meat comes from, I could probably go and visit the farm if I really wanted to! and the flavour is so much better! Plus it’s great to know that I’m supporting local farmers with ethics (ie free range, no antibiotics, etc), and we’re trying more vegetarian dishes now that we eat less. Another book that you might like is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma…. highly recommend it!
13 Natalie B // Jun 27, 2007 at 6:03 pm
ps I like gracebug’s idea of hiding a roll. I always have tp in the house… almost obsessively. What can I say? We’re girls, we can’t just “shake it off”!!
14 fern // Jun 30, 2007 at 8:37 am
i am about to run out of toilet paper. i cannot let this happen.
i read ‘fast food nation’ and was horrified. i can no longer look at anything that says ‘all natural’ or ‘natural flavors’ the same ever again. i stopped eating meat for a long time after reading that, but there is a restaurant here that sells locally raised beef and every now and then i go there for a burger. yum.