08/06/2026
Something to think about...
Onion sandwiches.
Oddly enough, this is the first of two essays I’ve written about them. I’ll keep digging for the other.
Have I mentioned to you that when I’m not writing about the Hair Hut, I write about ag and rural issues for the Denver and Colorado Springs Gazettes and Colorado Politics? I’m a real scream at parties.
Here you go.
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I squandered an opportunity several years ago and I think about it every damn day. We were on our way to a livestock show and I ran into the local Safeway to grab water and snacks. I grabbed grapes and granola bars and water and pretzels. The last thing I tossed in the cart was a box of what my grandmother called milk nickels. Ice cream bars on a stick dipped in chocolate. There were four in the box, it was hot, and it would soothe the savages in the back seat of the pickup.
In line, there was a woman with two kids. She looked exhausted - she was younger than me with brassy hair and a stretched out, worn thin shirt. Her son was about 12 and looked hungry and hot. Her daughter, who was maybe 6, was in the cart in front of mine. While the mom dug around in her purse, I looked at the food the impatient checker had bagged. Bread and onions.
The little girl was eyeballing the food I placed on the belt, especially the ice cream. She swiped her finger through the frost on the box and licked it off a grungy little finger. Her mom was paying for the groceries with whatever change she could find.
I should have paid for her food. I should have added the water and snacks in my cart to the order, paid it all, and given it to her. I should have done something brave. But I squandered the chance.
Son of a bitch.
She had white bread and onions in her cart and I don’t think they were the two missing ingredients to a larger meal. I think that was the meal. These things ought not happen in rural America. These things ought not happen in the grocery check out line in front of another mom. These things ought not happen within view of a woman who spills a tremendous amount of ink decrying bad ideas in the name of reducing GHG or combating climate change or ensuring compassionate treatment of animals that take food off the tables of people in the margins.
I hurriedly paid for my groceries and hustled out to the pickup and trailer where my family was waiting. I walked by her car. It had out-of-state plates and there was nothing about it or them that led me to think they were tourists driving through to get to the “good” part of the state. Her boy, he must have been the man of the house, was juggling the battery cable while she cranked the car. All I could see of the little girl was her dirty ponytail bouncing in the back window.
I can only imagine her situation since I lacked the confidence to go hand her my grocery bags and I’ve never forgotten that day. Poverty and hunger are not exclusively urban problems. These are the people who suffer when misguided voters or lawmakers decide the happiness of a chicken is more worthy than a mother who can’t afford to pay more for cage free eggs, which are now the only option in the case. Those higher priced eggs now replace what once was a cheap, high quality protein with a virtue-signaling casualty of people who haven’t been unable to feed their kids more than onion sandwiches.
These are the people who suffer when their company sends production to another of their owned facilities in a state not actively attacking agriculture, sending her job with it.
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