When I was a kid, I was delighted by the brazenness of generic groceries. There was Dr. Thunder, a soda whose name made its ambitions extremely clear. There were chocolate sandwich cookies called Twist and Shout. Somewhere in the cereal aisle were frosted flakes fronted not by Tony the Tiger but, as I remember it, a polar bear: a perfectly respectable mascot, just not the famous one.
That was part of the charm of generic food. It was forever making a little sideways gesture toward something else. The cookie was an Oreo in community theater; the cereal was performing Kellogg’s in a cheap wig. Whether we bought the understudy depended, in my family, on whether the ingredient “mattered.” For peanut butter cookies, my mom might spring for Jif and Kerrygold, then grab store-brand flour and brown sugar. Lasagna meant Rao’s sauce and Breakstone cottage cheese layered with Kroger ricotta and noodles. Grocery shopping involved a constantly shifting private calculus of where quality lived, where branding mattered and where an extra two dollars seemed frankly ridiculous.
