Ketchup in a Can

It all started at the Used Food store in Ledward, Massachusetts. It wasn't really called "Used Food." It was the Community Foodshare Program or something, and it served a few down-and-out-and-never-coming-back mill towns. But this was used food. Opened bags of cereal stapled shut. Boxes of crackers missing half the contents. Soup in mason jars. But the prices!

I bought badly dented cans of vegetable broth at five for a dollar. My friend Tenny bought a nearly-full 2-liter bottle of soda ("It's still got fizz!") for 15 cents. Tenny loved Used Food. He made special trips there. It wasn't the food, of course. And it sure wasn't the dim fluorescent atmosphere, either. What he loved were the finds.

Buried on the shelves among the cookie crumbs and stale snacks, sometimes, if you were lucky, were treasures. Tenny fell hard for the Empress Vegetable Sandwich, the Fruit Flavor soup, and the sealed packets of chocolate sauce.

These things never did it for me. They were strange, sure, and sometimes absurd in the way that college students find appealing. But I wasn't in love. Tenny would go on and on all the way back to campus, making up jingles and alternating between shaking stuff into his mouth and practically gagging when he tasted it. Used Food can be a cruel mistress.

One day when Tenny was browsing the pantry, I saw something stacked in the corner. Three cans, a little silver pyramid. An old man, nearly bald, wearing thick glasses and a drooping bowtie, smiled on the labels. I investigated and discovered Grandfather's Ketchup. Ketchup in a can, no less.

I had to have them all. $2.55 (plus tax) later and I had cornered the market on Grandfather's Ketchup.

What was it about this stuff? Ketchup? In a can? It made me think of backyard mavericks and basement inventors. No bottles for Grandfather, the sly old visionary! This was bucking the tide! Fighting upstream! Battling the odds! Standing on the mountaintop, proclaiming the power of One Man, of Truth! Of America!

I was hooked.