What’s for dinner?

January 16, 2006

I’m in line at the Meijer this afternoon, and I’m trying to figure out what the other people in line are going to have for dinner. Based on the contents of their shopping cart.

So the woman in front of me was pretty simple–she had a five-pound ground beef. Not only is she having beef for dinner, she’s clearly cooking for a family. I mean, you don’t whip up a five-pound whatever-it-is if you’re cooking for just one or two people. She has a whole family to feed.

I couldn’t nail down what kind of beef dish though, because the rest of her cart seemed unrelated to dinner. Some cereal, couple candy bars, that kind of thing. She must have had everything else she needed for the beef dish already at home.

Now the people in line behind me, they had a fascinating shopping cart. It consisted of one large bag of Cheetos (the extra-hot variety), about a dozen Yoplait’s (various flavors, but mostly strawberry), two twelve-packs of Coke, and a third twelve-pack of Dr. Pepper. What kind of dinner is that?

These people looked like the kind who just might in fact have that stuff for dinner. One of the women had the bleach-blond hair teased up to an inch of its life, so much volume it looked like she had a blond cotton-candy wig on or something. The other woman had so much makeup on I was fearful Tammy Faye Baker had somehow sneaked up on me. The third member of the party was a guy with the long, thin, wispy Axel Rose kind of hair. His I think might have been natural blond, not the fake blond of his companion. Hard to tell, but he just didn’t strike me as the kind of metrosexual guy who would dye his hair so that’s why I assume it was his natural color.

I love playing this what’s-for-dinner game. Tonight’s was the best episode in quite some time. I should shop at the Meijer more often–the carts, and the customers, at Kroger are not nearly as fascinating.