American Consequences - March 2020

By Buck Sexton

Someone coughed in the aisle next to me.

Everyone flinched.

Walking into the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle this weekend felt like entering an encampment under siege in wartime. The place was packed. At 59,000 square feet, it is supposed to be the largest supermarket in Manhattan. It’s set in the opulent (even by New York standards) Time Warner Center. It is a monument to bourgeois capitalism, gluten-free largesse, and dozens of flavors of almond butter. And everyone was on edge... Shoppers were filling their carts as if a hurricane was going to hit within hours. Everyone was tense, frenzied, and – worst of all – packed in closely together. “Do you have any whole chickens?” I asked one of the haggard Whole Foods employees in the meat section. He said he didn’t think so. Steaks, burgers, and chops were all gone. Faced with a plummeting market and an unprecedented freeze in economic activity, my fellow New Yorkers wanted to make sure their freezers were full of red meat for the long weeks ahead. The same thing was true in the picked- through canned goods section. There was nothing except for a few dented cans of minestrone, probably because it is calorically almost useless, but which I also took as confirming my long-held belief that is it the worst of all soups. The good stuff – refried

beans, New England clam chowder, beef chili – was all long gone. The areas assigned to dry pasta were completely barren, too. Many of my fellow New Yorkers would face the future – come what may – with ample supplies of orecchiette and linguini. Even though New York believes its tap water is superior, there were also plenty of people stocking up with gallons of bottled spring water. I couldn’t help but think that if things get so ugly that the water gets turned off, that last jug or two of Deer Park probably isn’t going to make much difference. The empty shelves were a visual manifestation of the panic that has been shooting across the country in recent weeks. If the stock market’s decline wasn’t terrifying enough, the emergence of long lines just to get into grocery stores made it all feel real. America is the richest country in the history of the world. And in the Big Apple, our largest metropolis by population, the masses are hording toilet paper as though we just went through a socialist coup and Nicolás Maduro is now in charge. I did finally manage to find a whole chicken... It was the last one left in a bin that must have held dozens just hours before. As we are all under a form of “social distancing” guidance that is just a step away from “self-quarantine,”

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