The Meat Lady who Wouldn't Leave

We had a visit today from a representative of Town and Country Foods. They're a meat and produce wholesaler. They produce what appears to be very high quality meat, flash-freeze it, and send it out to you at reasonable prices. And they give you a freezer full of the stuff - enough to last for six months. Then you pay by the month.

I have to say it was a good sales pitch. The representative explained the exploding costs of supermarket foods, the problems of pesticides and food borne illness, etc. By producing high quality foods and shipping it directly to customers, this company can keep prices modest and consumers can avoid some of the problems of modern food production.

But as this pitch went on - for more than an hour - my wife and I realized that, even while we liked the idea of the plan, we'd have to change our eating style substantially for this to make economic sense to us. We'd have to eat a lot more meat and get used to eating more frozen vegetables. Hey, I love beef, but to me it's an occasional treat. We just don't have it in the house that often. And we love our fresh veggies. Town and Country won't get us heirloom tomatoes or morels. So I think what would end up happening would be that we'd spend a lot of money on meat that would just sit in our freezer for years, and we wouldn't save anything off our regular food budget. Either that, or we'd start eating like red staters. Neither is optimal.

But the meat lady didn't want to leave. I don't have much experience in sales, but I get the fact that once you leave someone's house, your chance of making the sale drops precipitously. So she digs in. Keep in mind it's about 7:45 PM. The kids' bedtime is rapidly approaching and we'd promised them ice cream. The kids were really being angels this whole time, but they were starting to lose it. So the meat lady says that she can just wait for us to put them to bed and can draw us up a menu and a contract while we're doing that. We say we want to think it over. She keeps asking if we have questions. We finally had to kick her out.

Now, she did leave us with an enormous quantity of sample meat - two T-bones, 2 lbs. of chuck, some burger patties, 4 pork chops, and some chicken. It looks good. If we really end up liking it, we'll think about the massive meat freezer. But I don't think this is going to happen.