Grocery Store Sushi
Perishable. Refreshed daily. A stepwise fountain of cold fulfilment for the most basic unmet need. The shortest distance from hungry to not hungry. The convenience of prepackaging without the preservatives or stigma. Simple ingredients, all natural, served in unbranded plastic. A refuge of the desperate, identical in all cities, all places, tonight's dinner is grocery store sushi.
So simple, yet so distant from the fish. Slack-jawed tilapia stare from the seafood counter mere steps away, their eyes baleful and blank. They would not recognize these tiny cubes of tuna, snugly wrapped in rice-and-nori blankets. The nori is like a faux skin, adhering to the rice and giving it shape. It will stick in your teeth, resist the rending of your bite. It will not feel like fish. It will, however, feel like food.
This despite the grim pageantry of its packaging. The wasabi is fake, is always fake, the same dyed horseradish paste found every sushi roll in America, but more prone here to bleachy discoloration. The ginger is bleachy too, the same dead pallor as sauerkraut, clinging to itself in a vinegar-laminated rosette. A single packet of soy sauce, slim and joyless, completes the tableau.
That's fine. You are not here for cuisine. You are here because you noticed an emptiness you lacked the initiative or forethought to address. You failed to think ahead, failed to put anything real into your belly, and instinct took you to the source of all abundance, your trusty grocery store. Your grocery store is where food comes from. It is the closest you can get to tilled soil. Your grocer is not here to wait on you, to dress up an experience, or even to nourish you. They are your paper-hatted guardian angel, safeguard of the infinite garden, keeper of the walk-in fridge. Surely they can take your empty feeling, the buzzing alarm of your neglected stomach, and give you something that will restore you. Something familiar, something made by human hands, something that will require absolutely zero social exertion of any kind.
And while grocery store sushi is never the best option, neither is it a last resort. However late your grocery store is open, there is always a restaurant open later. You can always get something hotter, faster, greasier, more satisfying than grocery store sushi. But sushi it is, because you are depleted. You know your grocery store will see you through this moment because it has seen you through far worse. When you are about to fall, your grocery store is there to catch you with a boxed cake for your birthday, premade soup for bouts of the flu, and pints of ice cream for the most dire of breakups.
And though it is there for you in sickness, it is also there for you in health. There is butter lettuce, still live on the root. Cilantro and parsley by the bundle, dutifully spritzed by the sprayers. Entire walls of green, green, green, ever refreshed, always more than you need. Staples and obscure imports, snackable and labor-intensive vegetables alike, an encyclopedic array of raw produce awaits your hand. Beyond this garden are the freshly cleaved meats cooling at the butcher counter. Tickets are announced, brown paper is wrapped, and gorgeous, scentless, fat-streaked cuts trade hands and tuck into carts and baskets. Each will make someone feel loved tonight.
Not you. None of these will land on your stove. Not only are you not cooking, you are resigned to a cold meal. At least you've chosen food intended as a meal. At least you aren't biting into a cheese block or stacking salami on a cracker. Grocery store sushi is not rock bottom, but it's close enough for you to notice how short a distance it is. It does not help that you forgot to grab disposable chopsticks. There are wooden ones at home, but there's no way this food will make it to a plate. Embrace the chaos. Use your bare hands.
The clamshell case is brittle, a challenge to remove without cracking. The stuck-on label is purely factual, nothing about it made to appeal, a simple list next to the stamped date on which it was made: today. As it must always be.
There are eight pieces, one for each of the eight dollars you spent. One of the pieces is missing avocado. Eye the wasabi as a possible replacement, similar in color and shape, especially with the yellow patch where ginger juice has dissolved its green tint. Respect its power. Do not use it to replace the avocado. Compromise.
Tear the soy sauce packet open. On how many park benches, how many car seats, have you weighed the risk of spillage against the reward of this familiar flavor? It is the closest many get to a uniquely male-bodied experience: the urgent risk of standing urination. The slightest disturbance in flow or pressure can make for an unrecoverable disaster. But here on the dining room table, you have the luxury of a broad flat surface that does not move. Your pants are safe. You can pour your sauce without fear, transform these gummy rice rounds into something edible.
Soy sauce, while ordinary, is complex and satisfying. Unsauced, grocery store sushi is a depressing affair. Chewy rice, pitifully sparse sesame seeds, and fish and veg only as fresh as is necessary for consumer safety. Soy sauce coaxes out the breathy nip of rice vinegar, enlivening every bite with salt and sour, turning a ration into a meal.
Despite this fermented lubrication the rice remains stiff and dry, obviously refrigerated well past its prime. The tuna provides relief with toothsome substance, its ruby depths the embodiment of luxury. The occasional crack of a sesame seed rises to greet the heat of wasabi and ginger, dancing above the rice with nimble nuttiness. The nori is a background note, a flexible membrane with an umami all its own, a boundary between the prize inside and the sallow, clock-punching, phoned-in lump of a rice wrap.
In minutes, it's gone. You have now eaten. You aren't full, but at least you are not empty. That was the goal all along, the impetus for your selection: the elimination of emptiness. Before this you were laying in your lethargy, saddened by inescapable torpor as all your bodily systems declined into uselessness. In this state you knew you had to eat something, knew your grocery store would hold an answer, and trusted your hand to pick the clamshell that was the least bad. And now you've done it. With this box checked, you can go to bed whenever you want.
Going to a grocery store and only buying sushi is unimaginable. For an empty, helpless body, grocery store sushi is a bridge back to the land of happy eaters, of people who feed themselves with joy and passion. You were one of them, still can be. Renew your membership by getting something you love, even if it is a little ambitious or indulgent. Even if the cherries rot, even if the fennel you bought on a whim goes unused at the base of a vegetable drawer until it dries into an inedible husk, such things are a bet on yourself, on a better future. Grocery store sushi is a life raft. The produce you buy alongside it is the currency of optimism.
Tomorrow we will all eat better. You will have the chance to make good on that promise because your food came from a grocery store. Not fast food, not take out. This is the food that sits next to the food that you cook with. This is the food that returns you to the gates of paradise. This is grocery store sushi.
