Per WCAX:
…She bought almost $400 worth of meat from a door-to-door salesman in 2010… “It was tough, didn’t have a good flavor, didn’t smell good when you cooked it,” she said.
The salesman came in a white refrigerated pickup truck with a logo on the side that said Steak House Steaks.
Okay.
So.
I’m not entirely certain as to what to say about this, because I have trouble imagining that buying foodstuff from a door-to-door salesperson is a good idea and I have trouble comprehending this scam as being effective. So I’m at a loss here. Part of me wants to ridicule this, but I’m thinking there are probably some vulnerable people out there who get intimidated by high pressure sales tactics and I don’t feel so right about making jokes about it.
So I’m just trying to kind of verbally think this out. Is this common? I’ve never heard of anyone selling meat door to door before, and I don’t comprehend the idea of buying food that’s completely unknown in terms of its origin.
I also understand that people do this all the time, whether they realize it or not and I’m a bit unusual in the respect that I pay attention to the food I eat, what its sources are and how it got here. But even though I get that people buy all sorts of things that are bad for them without paying attention to ingredients, food origins, etc., I somehow find this to be deeply disturbing on a more personal level. Even though I’m vegetarian, I don’t think that this is because of the meat in itself. It’s more the idea of meat you don’t know that just totally creeps me out.
I’m at a loss here.
Schwan’s has a long track record of home-delivering prepackaged foods that is reportedly pretty good… but buying food from a truck that came out of nowhere? Bleaurgh. I’m reminded of a fake ad I produced many years ago at a radio station in another part of the country, for Ronnie’s Road Kill Restaurant, down by the swamp off the county road. The tag line was “When you eat at Ronnie’s, you’ll say, ‘Mmmm, that’s road kill!'”
Er,sorry. As to your serious point, yes, I’m faintly skeeved by meat of unknown provenance. I’m very glad that there’s a growing local-meat movement in Vermont.
I stopped eating at fast-food chains (not that I ever did it that often) after reading an item in Bird Talk magazine about sharing food with pet birds. Members of the parrot family are omnivores, and they often enjoy getting a tidbit off your plate. But the magazine warned not to feed them any fast-food burgers, because the chains have standards for acceptable levels of e. coli. They’re satisfied if their burgers contain some fecal contamination as long as it’s not enough to sicken a person. But birds are much smaller, and can get seriously ill from a slightly-tainted burger. It’s so reassuring to know that Mickey D’s goal is not to eliminate filth, but to keep it down to manageable levels.
A truck stopped by my house once. It was a marked freezer truck and they said that they had an order that the buyer claimed they never asked for. The driver and handler (there were two of them) wanted to sell the order before they headed back to Maine. They asked for $400, but we talked them down to $200. They said that their company was a subscription service and they left us with brochures from the company.
We bought four boxes, each one a different type, they were well and solidly frozen, no signs of having been thawed and re-frozen. We never saw them again.
Boy, were they good!
I do recall that, when we first moved to St. Albans in the mid-eighties, a refrigerator truck would pull up into the shopping center in front of the Grand Union every Saturday afternoon in summer. Locals routinely bought their fresh seafood hauled from Maine out of the back of that truck. It was wonderful!
A few years later, the trucking business became “Jeff’s Maine Seafood” and the rest is history.