FOOD ISSUES: The Case of the Purloined Thin Mints
Encounters with Girl Scout cookies as madeleine (while packing to leave an apartment)
Note: This essay is Part 3 of my chronicle of dealing with a looming temporary eviction and the ensuing 90-day displacement. Read the first piece for background.
I opened a box of Thin Mints yesterday, which is not remarkable this time of year, with Girl Scouts lying in wait outside supermarket doors all over town, parked with their moms at portable cafeteria tables piled high with every varietal of the Girl Scout cookie.
What is probably more unusual is that the box that I opened — out of the pantry — was from at least two years ago, perhaps three. The cookies were fine. I would have to perform a bite vs. bite crunch test to see if they are as crunchy at 2 years old as they are fresh out of the tote bag of an itinerant Brownie.
It’s true: You don’t even have to freeze Girl Scout cookies. They just don’t go bad.
Some years more than others, the sight of a box of Girl Scout cookies brings back memories of — year after year, for about five years — slogging through snow to the neighbors’ houses in late January with an order sheet, and slogging back through, a month later, with boxes of cookies to deliver. No, my parents did not come with me. No, not even to deliver the cookies. Everyone paid by check, and the checks were written out to my dad, who would then write a giant check (for the neighbors’ amount plus the cookies we got for ourselves) to the scoutmaster, who would write the biggest check of all to the Girl Scouts of America.
I do not know why we sold cookies. Our troop did not save up to go on big trips, or anything of the kind. We went camping once, but we just slept in tents on someone’s farm. We just sold cookies. I think it’s the only thing we did some years.
Cookies are forever
I have a brand-new, unopened box of Thin Mints sitting on the table with my mail. Dan brought these home from work, where some Girl Scouts were ensconced with their moms outside of Costco in the South of Market district in San Francisco.
Why haven’t I opened the new box? Because I had a perfectly good box in the pantry. Why did I never open that box? Why did Dan bring me cookies out of the blue?
Let’s take a few steps back in time.
How I came back to the Mission District
Several years ago, I was living in a suboptimal housing situation, you could call it a halfway house, although the management called it a co-op, and I was sleeping in a twin bed in a large, but not enormous room I shared with a woman who I only knew because we lived in the same apartment. The co-op was in the Excelsior, half a block from the library, and two men lived in the room next to ours.
The house had done its job. I was settled back into the real world, I could function without a curfew or inspections or rules for the sake of rules. I was handling things, I had reached consensus with consensus reality, and it was okay. I was in school and so forth.
I was ready to move along and not sure how I would do it, as I had heard the rents in San Francisco had continued their inexorable climb, and I had literally never looked for an apartment. I always just stumbled across places for rent.
I figured I had better get stumbling, when one day a friend who I’ll call Ramona called me and told me that a room in her 4-bedroom flat in the Mission had opened up, and would I like to come see it?
How soon could I come over? Are you home right now?
The Mission was the only San Francisco neighborhood I’d lived in before I lost everything that I lost, and it was the neighborhood I still conducted all my business in, and hung out in for the most part, and I could not conceive of wanting to live anywhere else. The Excelsior was fine, quieter, but its main feature as far as I was concerned was that it was 20 minutes to the Mission on the bus.
So Ramona calls, and I go see the room, and it’s pretty big, not much smaller than the one I’m sharing with a stranger. I’d known Ramona a few years from a couple different vectors. She and Dan had lived in the flat I’m writing this from since 1992. The fourth roommate was a trans woman I already knew and liked; we’d been roommates in a 4-person room in rehab for about 6 months.
The price was right, the location was perfect, and it was available in 3 weeks. I said yes. (I’m still here.)
Dark chocolate, dark secrets
After I moved in, Dan ran up to me with an air of urgency and apology. “I didn’t tell you this before when you were here, because I had a good feeling about you, and I really wanted you to move in, and I’m sorry,” he said, very quickly, and my eyes widened as I waited for the horrible news he had been hiding from me. “But I have to tell you: Ramona is going to eat all your food! Aaah! I said it!”
I laughed and asked Dan to slow down and repeat himself. “What do you mean, she’s going to eat all my food?”
“Okay, maybe not all of it. But some things you will have to hide. Or just not keep around. Like Nutella. Just don’t even bring Nutella in the house, it isn’t safe. For anyone.”
“Like how? Nutella turns Ramona into some kind of radioactive housemate?”
“Pretty much. I’m sorry. I’m probably making a bigger deal of it than it is; she’s been better lately, but I didn’t want you to be unprepared.”
Breathing Anonymous
Shortly after that, and maybe because Dan told Ramona he’d told me her big secret, Ramona quit eating sugar altogether, as well as wheat and other grains. Mostly. She instead spent hours and hours boiling cabbage and broccoli and eating plate after plate of it, leaving pots of half-eaten vegetables all over the kitchen, stubs of cabbages or ends of carrots on any surface you could think of.
She weighed all her food on a food scale. She wrote everything down. She used to be kind of chubby, and then she’d lost weight, and then she’d gained some back, and she was Not At All Concerned With My Weight I Just Want to Eat Healthier, but she went to meetings about it. She was Not Doing This Just to Look Good, but she wore successively smaller and tighter clothes, and she looked great in them.
I asked Ramona once if she had a scale I could use, and she half-lectured, half-bragged at me about feeling healthier and feeling less out of control and feeling like her weight was not a concern of hers, nor was how she looked, but how she was eating was the main thing, she was healthier, and so was feeling that she was healthy, it wasn’t about numbers at all, of course I don’t have a scale. I just wanted to weigh a suitcase before I took it to the airport and make sure I hadn’t gone over the 50-lb. limit.
She was In Control or Surrendering Because Powerless or whatever variety of meeting she was using, and the strict controls and constant monitoring seemed to be working for her in large part, but she would relapse. As she called it.
The thing about food addictions is that, unlike almost any other kind of addiction, there is no such thing as total abstinence. Everyone has to eat, and so the act of living a healthy, productive life puts food addicts (and food addicts with cooccurring addictions) in the path of danger more often than it does other addicts. A clean coke addict doesn’t have to do enough cocaine to stay alive; an abstinent alcoholic doesn’t have to figure out what the right amount of alcohol is for him once he settles on zero. Food addicts have to titrate. They have to eat.
SO WHAT ABOUT THE COOKIES
I went away on a trip, and not a long one at all. A few days at a retreat or a few days housesitting in Bernal Heights. When I came back, my area of the pantry wasn’t in immediately observable disarray, but something felt odd.
I went to put some cereal in some yogurt for breakfast, and my cereal box was empty. Not only was that box empty, but one I had just bought and hadn’t yet opened was empty. Two empty boxes of cereal, put back in my pantry, empty. I felt increasing disbelief, as I picked up successive boxes of crackers, oatmeal, rice, and pasta, and they were all empty. It was like I had half the food I had had before I left, but it was taking up twice the space.
But the worst thing was the Girl Scout Cookies. It was early spring, and I had just bought some. And they were gone. No empty boxes, just gone.
Or so I thought. It gets weirder.
Eviction archaeology
So preparing for this temporary move-out situation, I was cleaning out the various cabinets and drawers of shared space in the pantry, including the top shelf that runs the entire way around the whole thing. We have a walk-in pantry with four compartments, three shelves for each roommate, but the top shelf was fair game. No one quite knew what was up there.
I got on the step ladder and was hoisting things down — a juicer, a wooden orange crate full of VHS tapes, an empty cardboard box that once held a clothing steamer — when I found, in a large, loose coil of rope suitable for mooring a ship, an empty box of Thin Mints. My Thin Mints. Ramona had eaten the cookies, and kept the box, and hidden it in the one place in the house no one ever looked.
I kept clearing the shelf, unearthing a massager suitable for a museum, a DVD player covered in the kitchen grease that had been wafting through the air for 15 years, and pulled down a cardboard box that held what once used to be a Neoprene wetsuit, now too decayed to retain any insulating properties.
I started laughing. “Dan!” I shouted. “Check this out!” There was not only a second box of Girl Scout Cookies — Trefoils, the shortbread ones, which I hadn’t missed as urgently — but three crumpled up packages of apple and cinnamon Quaker instant oatmeal, which I used to eat in the halfway house and which I continued eating when I moved into Ramona’s place, before I figured out you could make better for cheaper.
I also found an empty bag of Terra Chips, also mine. They are mighty expensive.
After completely clearing off the shelf, there was one last food wrapper, a mylar foil pouch from Pop Tarts, which must have belonged to the fourth roommate, H. She wasn’t surprised.
Diogenes the Brownie
When I sold Girl Scout cookies, my “beat” included some of the only apartment buildings in the tiny mountain town I grew up in (the population at the time was 500, which my dad thought was a high estimate). There were three apartment buildings one street behind ours, three long, brick buildings, two of them identical. The latter were two-story homes that happened to have common walls and identical fronts; they were more house-like than apartment-like on the inside.
I did not know the third building was an apartment building for a couple years into my sales gig. It looked like an enormous home, with a portico with white columns on either side of a heavy white door. The door had a doorbell, which I would push, and then I would listen to its ring echo through the halls of what I imagined was a very fancy home. I suppose it’s a refrain from church music, but I can still hear the sound of the bell, and the words I set to it: “Way, way down here, there’s no one here.”
One day I saw the mailman come out of the building, and I felt incredibly foolish. At least I didn’t run home and tell Mom, “I saw where the mailman lives!” That is the kind of mortifying thing that happens in joke books or sitcoms or Sunday comic strips, and it is also the kind of thing I used to do. Instead, the discovery increased my cookie sales territory by 10 whole families, without my having to expand my route.
But back to the other buildings, the ones I knew were like houses on the inside, because our family had briefly lived in one when I was three or four years old. The doors on these two identical buildings were white, and wood, and each had an outer door with a screen in the top half. The screen door of the last apartment in the row was off its hinges. It had been ripped away. The pneumatic door-closer dangled from the top of the door. There were shoeprints on both sides of the door. It had been kicked in or at more than once and was perpetually askew. I’m sure it got fixed, but it was always wrecked again. I avoided this door. The people were perfectly nice. They were friendly and, if I saw them outside of their home, they asked about buying cookies. I’m sure they loved cookies, and children. I did not ring their doorbell anyway.
There was another door, though, that I could not keep straight since it wasn’t on the end of the building, and even though there is no way I was soliciting strangers for cookies before cartoons were over on Saturday morning, I was ringing at what had to be the relative crack of dawn for this one man, perpetually unshaven, his hair a little too long, always in an undershirt, what they would later call a wife beater. Maybe he was a wife beater. He was not only angry, he was angry at me, for reasons I could not articulate then and still cannot.
I do know that he is probably the first person who ever shouted at me who I did not feel responsible to in some way. Who was neither a family member nor a teacher nor someone I had wronged in some way. I either deserved it or he was the bad guy. There were no hard feelings from me to him even though I still remember quite clearly knowing that I made a mistake and rang the wrong bell again. That he shouted at me. That he had shouted at me before. That if I wasn’t careful he would shout at me again. It wasn’t his fault, somehow. It wasn’t mine either, somehow. It was all just inevitable.
He was drunk and unemployed; I knew both of these things without knowing what I knew, and it was Just The Way Things Were For Some People. I think he had a girlfriend at some point who lived there with him. I think I sold cookies to her. Maybe that’s what set him off. I don’t know.
Pantry of thieves; the perfection of the unopened box
I do not want to give the impression that I am standing in judgment of Ramona for renouncing grains and then eating every grain that I owned, although I would not be surprised if I sounded that way anyway, because after all, she stole my food. She did not replace the food or pay for it. She offered. Every once in a while, one of us would bring up that she owed me money. (Now that she’s moved out, it’s probably time to bring it up one last time.)
Cookie thievery probably sparks resentment in a pretty wide swath of the population, but it lingers for those of us who also have issues with food.
This is where I finally get around to trying to address why I had a two- or three-year-old box of Thin Mints (and still have an unopened box of Samoas) in my pantry. Someone brought me some. Maybe it was my boyfriend at the time, maybe it was a friend who heard my tale of woe. I’m pretty sure I didn’t buy them myself. But there they were, and they made me feel safe and taken care of. They were evidence that some injustices in the world could be mended.
The cookies ceased to be sustenance and became a symbol of same; their defining feature as comfort food became the Platonic ideal of the Girl Scout cookie, and that meant that if I ate that particular box of cookies, they would lose their properties of protection and the evidence that I was cared for would be gone. I am aware of how nutty that sounds, and is. I know it’s not rational. I know it’s hoarding behavior, and that not eating the cookies defeats the purpose of owning cookies.
I also know that some people would be astonished by the fact that I could open a sleeve of Girl Scout cookies this past Sunday and not have it be gone by today, Thursday, much less leave them around the house for years unopened. This is not a feat of willpower. The saving of the cookies must be an attachment to a perfect, impossible world. The savoring of them is more practical: I can’t eat that much sugar at once; I no longer enjoy doing so.
I haven’t had the time to inventory my pantry yet, to box up food to donate or give to friends or take with me on the first leg of my housesit-hopping. Or compost. Before the advent of municipal compost, I was loathe to get rid of unspoiled food even if I knew I would never get around to eating it. I’ve held onto that resistance to throwing some food out until after it had actually gone bad.
I know I will unearth more unholy truths about my own compulsions around food when I clean out the cupboards.
I have a deep aversion to allowing food to go to waste, and yet, like most Americans who live indoors, I do not eat every scrap of food I buy. For example, in going through a box of papers, I found a piece of turkish taffy, still wrapped in cellophane but gone a bit soft, and I hesitated before throwing it away, even though the likelihood of me eating it after saving it and unearthing it was very, very low. I imagine that’s how it got in that box. Someone gave it to me, and it was free, and it was food, and therefore it was not garbage, even though the only candy I ever really eat is dark chocolate and salted licorice.
Cake, interrupted
My housemate H reminded me recently of the one time she saw me really, really angry. I threw a big party for my 40th birthday, and a friend of mine who is a professional caterer made my cake. But lots of other people brought desserts, too, and I took home basically an entire sheetcake, carrot cake with butter cream frosting, which I planned to take to an upcoming party for my friend’s baby shower, two days later. There was not room in the fridge for this much cake, so I wrapped it up tightly in plastic and set it on an unused table behind the TV in the living room. I also cut off a healthy slab and placed it on the kitchen table for my housemates to eat.
I went to fetch the cake, and discovered that my housemates had been eating not the cake that I had set out for them, but the one I had tightly wrapped and hidden away. Not only that — and this is what made me lose my shit — they had been taking random cuts out of two sides of the cake. Picture a cartoon of a castle wall, and this is what two edges of the cake looked like, notched all to hell. Who cuts a square out of the middle of the side of a cake? Who does this, again and again, in different places? Who eats that much cake in two days, anyway?
In my head, I was bringing over a beautiful dessert, and it was ruined by a horde of scoundrels who had riddled it with bullet holes or bitten off large chunks of it with their bloodstained teeth. It was fine. I calmed down, I trimmed the edges, I shrugged when I put the cake on the table, and said “Housemates.”
My anger at my housemates — who had been literally just thoughtless, not plotting to ruin anything — reminds me of the anger of that man in the undershirt, shouting out a screen door in winter at a little girl in a red down coat with a brownie sash over it, asking if he wants to buy Girl Scout cookies.
I sold cookies five years in a row, and had this experience with this man several times. It seems unlikely he was in the same anger and disarray for the whole five years, but a lot of the things I have done for five years running would seem pretty unlikely to a lot of people, and a lot of the anger I have held and hurled is just as improbable.
It’s only food. We’re only human.
And Thin Mints are only cookies, and it turns out they last forever. If she had eaten Samoas, though. I might be writing this from prison.
You can follow my travels through eviction and displacement here, on tumblr, and on tinyletter. All my places.
