A guy came to my door today selling fish. More specifically, a ratty old blue mini-pickup pulled up in front of my house, a truck with a chest freezer in the bed, and a guy got out and came bounding up my steps with the false cheer of a true door-to-door salesman. I was on a conference call at the time, and I tried to get rid of him by telling him I was on a call, that I work at home. “What time do you get off work?” he said. “I don’t buy things from people who come to the door,” I told him. He looked both miffed and amused, and bounded down my steps with a bounce in his step that implied it was my loss, that I was missing out on the Amazing Deal he’d brought Right To My Door.
First of all — I’m going to buy food from some stranger who drives up to my door with a chest freezer in the back of his truck? I know I’m a little nutty about provenance, and that I’m probably more invested than most people in buying food from sources I can identify, but really, I’m not buying food from an icky stranger who bounces up my front steps as though he’s about to push his way in and demo a vaccuum cleaner. Sheesh. Go away.
My grandfather’s career was peddling fish off a truck all over town. He left before dawn 6 days a week and drove into the city to the Fulton Fish Market. He delivered to restaurants and regular customers, and also drove around ringing a bell and he would fillet fish right out of the back of the truck.He made a good living and they were very comfortable.
Funny thing is, I’d never buy fish out of a truck either! Times have changed.
Well, fish off a truck in New York seems different than fish off a truck in Montana — actually, it isn’t even the fish so much, but the guy’s schtick — he came through earlier in the summer, and it’s not just fish, but boxed sets of steak — and he has a whole speil that involves flipping open demo boxes of various steak combos. I mean, I buy my fish from our friend Chris, who fishes for it in Alaska, and he’s about one step away from a freezer in a truck — and the Hutterites bring veggies and frozen chickens down in their truck and set up in the parking lot at the local mall — but this guy — it all just reeks of some creepy scheme. Reminds me of the summer I canvassed door-to-door for a PIRG in California, and unbeknownst to our donors, we took home half of what we took in.
We had a similar experience recently. A couple of guys pulled into our driveway (in a semi-rural hamlet in Columbia County, NY). They told my husband that they needed to fill a quota to sell “restaurant-quality” steaks. We were new here (didn’t quite know where to shop), and what they were offering was cheap, so we bought some ($20 for 3 pounds of T-bone steaks).
Just last week we were at a bona-fide farm to shop for (among other things) cuts of beef…, when two guys pulled up to the farmhouse with the Exact Same Pitch. The farm proprietors and my husband laughed it off, but it does seem like there’s a scam afoot. FYI, the beef we bought from them was okay (not great). But…. and now I’m shuddering – what is the source? how are the cattle handled? I think this was completely unregulated beef, in every respect.