No wonder everybody gets so fat around the holidays. It isn’t the dinners that cause the problem; it’s the food you send and get sent by mail.
Did anybody ever stop to consider who far in advance those catalogue people start baking, pouring, molding and packing those little pots of cheese, tins of popcorn and vacuum packed smoked meats to mail via the parcel system to wreath festooned doorways the world over? Food by mail gives me the hinkeys anyway. If the supermarket doesn’t carry it, or if I can’t find it within an hour’s drive of home, I don’t think it’s worth it.
It seems strange to me to have some poor Maine lobster thrown into a box with some survival munchies to keep it alive, sent tooling through some shipping facility, parked in cargo on a plane and flown to someplace that probably never sees an ocean, only to see it arrive at a family’s doorstep, have some happy cook throw open the lid and shout with glee, “Oh ducky, it’s the lobster we’re going to execute for dinner tonight.” Mind you, I’m not a vegetarian, and I don’t have a problem with going out and buying meat that has been prepared in a package for me, and I go to Red Lobster regularly, but I will not be the executioner of some poor crustacean living out its last days in a fish tank, and I won’t let somebody ship one to me.
Those little containers of twenty different cheese spreads can look like a gourmet dream, but one time I had a shipment of those and only found one to be enjoyable let alone edible.
If I’m going to ship something to somebody as a holiday gift, I’ll make it something really useful like a potholder or a gift certificate, not a dried and processed overpriced thingajiggy from who knows where.
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