We traveled last weekend, and we are traveling again this weekend, and so instead of shopping for groceries in person this week, confronting our food face-to-face, we used The Internet™ to place an order. I woke up on Monday morning to bags of food outside my front door. These bags, though made of paper, had the capability to keep refrigerated things cold. The frozen things? Hardly thawed at all, though they had sat for more than half an hour by the time I arose from my bed. This is our reward for tolerating a network of computers with which we interface daily to make ourselves and others unhappy.
The bags were assembled and delivered by one or two delivery persons, as the English language implies, and having delivered food myself from time to time (though never a full order of groceries), I feel confident in my hypothesis that the delivery persons’ incentive involves working quickly, and that the job only in specific arenas demands attention to detail. This incentivization and demand structure is presumably responsible for what happened with the black beans. The delivery person who put the two cans of black beans into the technologically marvelous brown paper bag did not appear to notice the small block lettering above “Black Beans.” Those letters? SPICY.
Thankfully, I am not Joe Mentalino, the man Lloyd Christmas killed. Spice is not a mortal risk for me. Too much of it, sure, I start grabbing for the water glass, and later, grabbing for the toilet brush. But a little spice is not foreign to my diet. Spicy black beans rather than my usual, bland self? An interesting wrinkle in my planned drudgery. Perhaps even a good one, I thought, sprinkling them out as I prepared my meal.
Indeed, the spice is nice. I am on my second day this week of eating panini press quesadillas for lunch, and I can confirm that by adding spicy black beans in place of the unspiced variety, your folded tortilla smashed around a pile of shredded cheese can be livelier than you ever considered, yet not so lively as to leave you saying, “Ooh! That’s hot!” Would I do it again? No. I am eating panini press quesadillas for lunch. This is baseline food and deserves to be treated as such. But maybe, just maybe, the next time I travel on consecutive weekends I’ll make sure to put black beans on the grocery list. Just in case the universe winks again. It’s a subtle spice. In more ways than one.
