One of the things I'll remember from the great Covid pandemic - assuming I'm around to do so - will be the weirdness of grocery shopping. As straying from your fortified bunker is viewed as grave peril trips to the store have been less frequent, for greater amounts of supplies, and somehow more anxiety producing. This from someone who does not much care for shopping under the best of conditions.
Recently we made a run to Aldi. This is an odd chain of stores. It's a German company with 10,000 stores in 20 countries. They are of course clean and efficient. And the quality of their goods is pretty good....if more than a little peculiar.
Aldi typically has a mix of brand name and generic knock offs. Also a wide selection geographically, with lots of European influences. Maybe with a few concepts that don't translate well across oceans. Here's a few oddities, things that caught my attention instead of being helpful to the Quartermistress General in her work.
This was in the cheese department. Flavored Goat Log Assortment. I wonder if this is a big deal in Germany? Putting it through Google Translate it comes out as: "Aromatisierter Ziegenstamm". Which actually does sound better. Also in the cheese department was this product. Am I the only one who saw the name and had a horrific vision?
Without even leaving the cheese and sausage cooler there was also this gem. These are American products so I can't blame language or cultural difficulties for the oddness.
That's a Jackalope. And some kind of large, obese, flightless bird. In slapping together a link I was amazed to learn that creatures akin to Jackalopes appear in natural history books as far back as the 13th century! These were likely normal rabbits infected with a papilloma virus that caused them to grow large warty growths. Yep, just what I want in my lunch.
The saddest find of all was in the kids cereal section. There have always been choices between brand name cereals and generic knock offs. Not, mind you, in the sugar content which is impressive in both. No, it shows up more in things like how fast you have to eat it to avoid it turning into a disgusting brightly hued sludge. Oh, and the art work is better on the real versions.
Here is brand name "Lucky Charms", a concoction that I enjoyed on occasion back in the day. Lucky the Leprechaun has been modernized a bit.
But oddly, there was an attempt in the mid 1970's to replace Lucky with an absent minded magician called Waldo the Wizard. The concept was dutifully test marketed....weirdly being very popular in New England but in the rest of the US, not so much.
It was decided to just make Lucky cuter. Get rid of any implication that the leprechaun might be holding out on you with respect to that whole pot of gold thing. Ease up on the "Oirish" accent that in a less sensitive era was code for "Aye needs a drink badly m'lad" The Wizard vanished.
Or did he? Here in the starkly lit aisles of Aldi have I found the otherwise worthless copyright image of Waldo the Wizard? Or is it just a grim vision of what Lucky will look like on the day that his dipsomaniac life style, raging diabetes and true age become manifest?
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