Food Labels

My cheap mother dated this huge loser named Glenn for a while. Glenn delivered pizzas for a living. For about a year of my childhood, I think, we had some cold messed-up Pizza Hut order for dinner about 5 nights a week. Yum.

But that's not the point. Glenn was kind of stupid (that's how a man comes to deliver pizzas for a living well into his thirties). Glenn was convinced that Chiquita bananas were better than other brands of bananas. They might be; I haven't tested for myself. But, at the same time, I can see how my mother thought this was silly. In order to avoid buying more expensive bananas, she started buying Chiquitas once in a while, then saving the stickers, so that when the next few bunches she bought were generic, she could stick a Chiquita sticker or two on the generic bunch, and Glenn would be none the wiser.

It may not surprise you to hear that Glenn had preferences for other name brand items, such as Kellogg's Corn Flakes, or Jif Peanut Butter. Naturally, my cheap mother expanded her banana-label-replacing scheme to cover all kinds of foods. Pull the bag out of a generic box of cereal, drop it in a Kellogg's box, and voila! You've got yourself some name brand cereal.

Of course, you can tell the difference. These name brand Corn Flakes taste funny, you think. It never occurs to you, though, that someone could be so cheap, so obsessed with proving that her way is smarter and better, that she could have swapped Corn Flakes. If these came out of the name brand box, they must be name brand. Then, of course, my cheap mother reveals her scheme and offers as proof that generic cereal is the same as name brand cereal the fact that you didn't notice the difference. Even though you did.

Epilogue: I think Glenn came to our house a couple years later selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. It was awkward.

School Lunch

Almost every day for school lunch in K-5th grade, I took my lunch to school. It consisted of generic white bread with peanut butter and the cheapest grape jelly sold in stores, a baggie of some kind of plain potato chips or potato sticks, and one "Mega" brand vanilla cookie (I'm sure you have seen those horrible cheap vanilla, chocolate, and lemon cookies). I liked the chocolate cookies much better, but my cheap mother liked the vanilla better, so we never got chocolate. The only variation in this lunch was that rarely I would get tuna fish (a real treat), and sometimes we would run out of potato snacks and cookies, and then I might get something like two apples plus a sandwich. I don't remember what I had to drink, but I'm sure it was awful and cheap. This carried on every day for 6 years. What changed? I started going to public school and we qualified for free or $.25 lunches, so then I got school lunches, which were great in comparison. Sometime in high school my parents made too much money for reduced price school lunch, and so faced with more peanut butter sandwiches, I decided to buy my own lunch. This cost me $1.40 per day. That's right, my mom refused to pay $1.40 for school lunch because she could put together a lunch for less than that.

For years, I was unable to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Perhaps it was the psychological aspect of being forced to eat the same damn thing for so many years, or perhaps it was because those sandwiches were so cheap and gross. One day I decided to try peanut butter and jelly again, and know what I discovered? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches taste completely different if decent bread and jam are used. I actually like them. I still hate store brand vanilla cookies.