McLEAN, Virginia. When Todd Pfeiffer arrived at the Whole Foods market here yesterday he was so used to strolling right in that he didn’t notice the line of customers that snaked its way around the side of the building. “The people were social distancing, so it didn’t look like a line at first,” he says. “If you’re six feet apart, it appears as if everybody’s just standing around.”
A few people cleared their throats in a rather conspicuous manner, and when Pfeiffer realized how many were ahead of him, he began to rethink his Sunday dinner plans–grass-fed beef steak tips. “I gave up at forty-five people and thought ‘We must have something left at home I could grill,’” he says as a look of chagrin clouds his face. “Then I thought of Kirsten,” the blonde au pair who takes care of the Pfeiffers’ two children. “But only for a minute, I swear.”
Kirsten: “What’s for dinner, Mr. Pfeiffer?”
Pfeiffer ended up shopping at a downscale grocery store a half mile away where the wait to get inside was under a minute. “Some people just like to pay less money for their food, I can’t figure it out,” says Todd’s wife Nancy, who refuses to buy inexpensive, non-organic food. “Personally I would’ve waited in line for the comfort of knowing that the cows we were eating led happy lives and died in peace at the hands of a sensitive butcher.”
But the hastily-dismissed moment of inspiration that struck her husband before he settled on marinated chicken breasts sent him to his home office after dinner where he applied the same tools that have helped him climb to the position of CFO at SourceData, a tech company that makes something technical, to the cost of putting food on the family’s table.
“I have a nice cut of lawn guy, also some pool boy.”
“They’re predicting meat shortages,” he says as he plots household expenses against his income, which has fallen since the coronavirus crisis hit as all highly-compensated “C-Suite” employees at his company have taken 10% pay cuts. “As supplies fall, prices will go up and we’re going to face a squeeze. At some point, it might make sense to convert Kirsten from an expense item to a current asset–inventory.”
The Pfeiffers are among many suburbanites who, while they may have been horrified by tales of cannibalism in the past, are beginning to re-examine their lifestyles for the possibility that they’re unconscious victims of hidebound prejudice and sloppy thinking. “We welcome those who’ve shunned us in the past,” says Executive Director Wilson Donovan of the Cannibal Rights Association, a non-profit that has tried a variety of fund-raising tactics over the years to keep itself afloat. “We usually get a pretty good turn-out for raffles and car washes, but for some reason, not our bake sales.”
Virginia has a lost tradition of cannibalism, dating to a period in the early days of the colony known as “The Starving Time” of 1609-1610, and servants were sometimes on the bill of fare. “If you ran out of food, you could eat your clothes and your shoes, but at some point people want to have a nice meal with some protein in it,” says Dolly Hearthwaite, a descendant of early settlers here who is proud to qualify as an “f.f.v.”–first family of Virginia. “I have some old family recipes that could come in handy if the price of Chilean sea bass goes much higher.”
The dark period in Virginia’s past isn’t talked about much among current residents of the state, but it has been the subject of both histories and fiction, a short story titled “A Curious Case of Colonial Cannibalism.” “I don’t want to discourage people from delving into the past,” says state Assistant Director of Tourism Myron Krisp. “It might take their mind off the embarrassing present.”
And I just watched a documentary on the Donner Party. History repeats?