Stuffing
Young people today might not understand the attraction of stuffing. I mean that melange of stale bread, vegetables and herbs that comes out of the middle of the turkey at Thanksgiving.
There used to be something special about it, not least of which was its scarcity. Turkey breeders have concentrated on increasing the size of turkey breasts, to the point that a commercial turkey may have difficulty walking (unlike its forebears, for whom walking was the main form of motivation, and running, rather than flying, was the principal means for escaping predators). I guess they never got the idea that increasing the size of the body cavity (to hold more stuffing) might be a selling point.
Even when Martha Stewart pointed out that you can separate the skin from the body, creating a previously unimagined space to stuff, and nearly doubling the available stuffing capacity, stuffing was still in short supply. I especially love stuffing cooked beneath the skin, where it gets all crispy and saturated with turkey fat. Yum!
Of course my mom usually baked an extra pan of stuffing, knowing how much we all craved it. But even then it was only at Thanksgiving time, a rare treat, and all the more special for that.
Naturally, scenting (pun intended) a potential market, packaged food manufacturers stepped up to the plate (pun again) to provide us with a convenient way to serve stuffing ANY TIME OF THE YEAR! Wow! Could anything be more great?
Well...
So now there is nothing particularly special about stuffing. It is simply another side-dish option, along with Rice-a-Roni, Tater Tots, and god knows what else. No magnicificent bird, no crispy skin, no family gathered, just another package you pick up when it's on sale.
So, what's so great about scarcity anyway. For most of the population of the world scaricity really sucks. Get too much of it and you can be dead. Here in the US of A we live, not so much in abundance as in obesity, yet it is still scarcity that sells. Scarcity sells because no matter how much you have, someone else has more (except, maybe, for Bill Gates). You can sit there, at your Thanksgiving supper, stuffing yourself, and imagine that somewhere, in Beverly Hills maybe (though god knows they wouldn't be caught dead eating anything so fattening in BH), someone can afford to have two turkeys, twice as much stuffing - they cook that second turey just for the stuffing...and after they clean it out they feed the turkey to the CAT!...or something - creating an "urgent need" that can be "satisfied," any day of the week, by your friends down at ArcherDamnitsMeddling or General Shills, or whoever it is that sells that over-salted, monosodium glutamated, trans-fat saturated, palid substitute for stuffing. How can they even call it stuffing, when it will never actually be stuffed into anything but your mouth?
Marketing history is one long, boring story of how good stuff is transmuted into mediocre stuff so that it can be sold to people who believe that it is stuff that will make them happy...I mean really, those rich folks, who can afford to buy the "good" stuff, they're obviously happier...aren't they? Well, at least they aren't working for some s.o.b., getting stinking wages and having to put up with all that b .s. (Of course they aren't, they are busy creating things like microwave stuffing to sell at high profits to turkeys like you and I.) Surely a little stuffing, in April maybe, could go a little way to righting the scales. Couldn't it?