Mid-Century InstaCart*

In the 1960s, which I’m starting to understand was a very long time ago, our family had milk, eggs and bread delivered to our house weekly. The milk and eggs were delivered by people named Milk Man and Egg Lady. The bread and cinnamon buns were delivered by the Bond Bread truck.

I’m thinking the Bond Company did a good job of branding, since I associate our bread delivery with the logo on the truck instead of a person. Or maybe the Supreme Court is right, and corporations are people. That extends to trucks.

Right outside our front door was a tin box with a hinged lid, just the size to hold two half gallons of milk. The milk came in those glass jugs with indents to allow big hands to grip them in one hand. Two hands for small children. Today we can get milk in similar jugs branded Strauss Creamery for an ungodly sum of money that makes you insist that the milk tastes better, fresher, more wholesome. Strauss Creamery products come from happy cows in the North Bay, and you can get Strauss only in fancy grocery stores, for a seven dollar deposit.

The deposit alone could have bought seven gallons of milk back in the sixties. Home-delivered.

I buy Strauss Creamery milk very occasionally, dutifully exclaim over its superiority, and then keep the glass bottle in my car for a few months until I remember to return it to the store, which is three blocks away. The seven-dollar credit makes a tiny dent on my grocery receipt, about the same as the senior discount I get on Tuesday mornings if I’m looking especially tired.

No doubt the milk box was tin in the same way aluminum foil was tin, back then. That is to say, not tin at all. Maybe the milk box was some kind of steel. I don’t know, I was a little kid, not a materials scientist, for heaven’s sake. It was a mottled metal. Kind of flimsy but decently weatherproof, as long as you kept it under the little rooflet that sheltered the front door while you shook and folded your umbrella.

That reminds me: Don’t make the mistake of putting your umbrella in the milk box. The umbrella stand was on the other side of the front door. If you forget, you will hear about it and then have to dry the bottom of the milk box with paper towels.

Milk was delivered on Tuesdays and Fridays. You put your empty bottles in the tin box in the morning, and fresh full bottles reappeared in the afternoon, twice a week. The box was not refrigerated, but that was okay back then because all households had two opposite-sex parents, and the double-X parent would be home to bring the milk in promptly and put it in the avocado-green side-by-side refrigerator-freezer. The 1960s had a lot of hyphens.

The delivery man for the Bond Bread company, who must have existed but about whom I have no memory, drove around in a square white truck with the Bond logo and delivered bread and other baked goods to our neighborhood on Wednesdays. We got iced cinnamon buns some weeks, and a loaf of Bond Bread every week.

Even though I don't remember him, I know the delivery man was a man, because the women were home waiting for their milk to be delivered, so they could get it into the fridge right away.

The Bond Bread man would put the bread and sticky buns into the tin milk box, in a display of devil-may-care that could have gotten him in trouble with Milk Man, if the deliveries had been on the same day. The (tin) milk box was branded with the logo of the milk delivery company (the dairy perhaps?), which I don’t recall because it wasn’t as stunning to a six year old as the Bond logo. It was some kind of red script; that much I remember.

I wonder if putting non-dairy items in the (tin) milk box is a federal offense, like putting a note in your neighbor’s mailbox to MOVE YOUR CAR ITS (sic) BLOCKING MY DRIVEWAY. I doubt it. I would hear my mom, inherently not a law-breaker, say to one of her friends on the phone, I put it in your milk box. The Gidget doll her kid had left at our house. The hairband. The secret to nuclear superiority.

The milk box was apparently quite secure. My mom would leave two envelopes of cash inside each week for Milk Man and Bond Bread. The flimsy hinge holding the lid down must have had security superpowers. Or people were just more honest back then, though I doubt it. More likely the whole neighborhood—heck, the whole town, was intimidated by my mother, all one hundred pounds of her.

Founded in 1915, Bond Bread company was named for the bond, the pledge, that their products were wholesome, much more similar to homemade bread than the product Bond Bread replaced, a loaf called Superior Bread that allegedly had sixty-five ingredients.

It surprises me that sixty-five ingredients had even been invented by then. When my parents were born, neutrons hadn’t even been discovered. Until 1932, white male scientists hadn’t figured out why atoms weighed so much more than they should have, given their atomic number. Dark matter perhaps. They smoked and scratched their heads, then returned to their calculations.

I learned about neutrons in fifth grade. That’s about the same time you start thinking your parents are really dumb. They didn’t even have neutrons, back when they were born.

Here’s one example of neutrons for my generation: CRISPR. My kids sequenced DNA in ninth grade biology, while I learned about Punnett squares in the section on genetics.

Sidebar: Punnett squares are a highly complex statistical tool that uses matrices to calculate the probability that two brown-eyed parents will have a blue-eyed child. The brown allele gets capital B because it’s dominant, and the blue allele gets lower-case b because it’s recessive.

Assuming people have two alleles for eye color, then BB and Bb produce brown eyes and bb produces blue eyes. You get one allele from each parent, and you don’t know whether their brown eyes come from BB or Bb. You might be able to figure that out from your aunts and uncles, if more than one of them have blue eyes. Or if you're given the prevalence of blue eyes in the ensemble, i.e. the population under consideration.

Calculate the probability that two brown-eyed parents will produce a blue-eyed child. (The answer is upside-down at the end of the article. Upside-down means it’s impossible to cheat.)

Now, there are lots of issues with this problem statement. First, approximately zero characteristics are determined by just one gene, two alleles. Second, pure dominance of one allele over another is about as rare in real life as the gender binary. Third, something like ten percent of people have a father different from the guy their mother says is their father. Fourth, my mother has green eyes. Fifth, I was adopted.

Talk about your error bars!

End of very long sidebar. Sorry about that. Back to Bond.

Now, I had no familiarity at all with homemade bread, so I couldn’t have commented on the similarity of Bond bread to the homemade version back then. What I remember is that you could tear out the middle of the Bond bread, and then squish it into half-inch cubes if your mom wasn’t looking. If she was, she’d say, Rebecca Sue! Stop playing with your food.

My secret goal was to see how small a cube I could make from one slice of bread, minus the crusts, which certainly cannot be included in these experiments. Result: I discovered that one slice could be compressed to about a cubic inch, but a bread (can you even call it bread at that point?) cube that size didn’t hold together. It resembled a loose ball more than a cube, and it gradually expanded. But quarter slices made stable half-inch cubes, and if you had enough time before your experiment was discovered, you could make impressively parallel cube faces. I’d construct them and then, oh jeez, I’d eat them. At that point they were just rubbery, pasty novelties, tasting vaguely of white.

And that’s if I’d remembered to wash my hands before lunch. On second thought, let’s not go there.

Bond Bread’s bond of quality was broken in 1972, when customers found something truly terrible in a loaf of Bond Bread. I can’t even say it. It may have been the thing that inspired urban legends, and Wikipedia says it’s true. The Bond company went bankrupt shortly thereafter. By that time we’d already stopped getting deliveries from the Bond Bread truck, because of the recession. In the 1970s Mom started saving money by getting bread at the A&P. She bought Bond’s competing brand, Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread is indistinguishable from Bond Bread, or vice versa for you, since you’re likely more familiar with Wonder Bread.

Wonder Bread still exists, not only the current product, but any Wonder Bread made in the 1960s that’s buried in landfills.

Why was/is pillowy snow-white bread desirable to the American public? Well, Americans were white and pillowy back then. Too many of us still are.

Back in the 1960s, Mom used to make lunches for us to take to school in our tin lunchboxes. Tin was a synonym for metal, back then.

Here was the lunch that Renie, Johnny and I got: An apple, which sounds good until I tell you that it was a Red Delicious apple, red indeed but with tough skin, mealy interior and devoid of flavor except for a hint of bitterness. To add to its charm, Mom would core and pre-slice the apple-shaped horror each morning so that every surface was brown by lunch time. I don’t think she intended to maximize oxidation; my guess is that she didn’t think of that. I never complained, just tossed my Red Not-Delicious into the cafeteria trash.

I ate the Chips Ahoy cookies, though. Thanks to plenty of preservatives, those weren’t the least bit stale by lunchtime, nor had they absorbed a molecule of humid sogginess from the heavy Pennsylvania air. Both Bond Bread and Chips Ahoy cookies contained tablespoons of bee-aitch-tee and bee-aitch-ay preservatives. They’re illegal now, or at least maligned by Bay Area foodies, but because my brother, sister and I consumed so much of those substances for our first two decades of life, our bodies will not decay for centuries. They won’t even burn.

To my kids and (eventual, theoretical) grandkids: Good thing to keep in mind in case a detective ever decides to exhume our bodies as part of a criminal investigation. It happens frequently, at least in my Netflix experience. For Boomers like us, thanks to the bee-aitch-ay and bee-aitch-tee we consumed over the years, our bodies will look disturbingly fresh.

To assemble our sandwiches in the 1960s, Mom would put mayonnaise on both slices of Bond Bread and slap on one slice of lunch meat, like bologna or ham or, later in the decade, turkey. There might be a leaf of wilted iceberg lettuce lounging limply under the lunch meat like Camille under a soft blanket. (She was always doing that, lounging, as she faded from consumption.)

Then Mom would cut off the crusts and put our sandwiches into waxed sandwich bags, the predecessor of Ziploc** polyethylene bags.

My friend Hooney said that our family was clearly rich because my sandwiches had the crusts cut off. But the crusts were not wasted: Mom tossed the crusts into a Bond Bread bag, hanging on the handle of the broom closet. We'd take the crusts to the duck pond of a winter’s morn.

The broom closet never housed a broom. That’s where the potato chips and extra cookies were kept.

It’s odd, really, this crust-removing behavior. The crust of Bond Bread was exactly as squishy as the rest of the slice; in fact, Bond Bread could have been baked a giant mattresses, cut into loaf-shaped entities, and dipped in yellow dye #3 to give the outside surface a crust-like, slightly golden appearance.

The poor ducks. They're mostly gone now.

For a few glorious years I traded my sandwiches with a friend who lived up the street. Her mom made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I loved those, and she preferred lunch meat and mayo. It was the perfect arrangement, until her mom found out and called my mom.

Do you know how expensive lunch meat is, Rebecca? Mom demanded. From now on you’re getting peanut butter and jelly, young lady.

I put on my Sorry face by making my eyes into a colon and my mouth into an open-parenthesis, and I was careful to rejoice only on the inside.

We also had an egg lady. She delivered eggs on Mondays, and put them on top of the milk box because the milk company owned the rights to the inside of the milk box, even on Mondays. She respected their logo.

We didn’t lose the egg lady to the recession of the 1970s, or even to the Bond Bread scandal of 1972. We lost her to scarlet fever. Not hers, ours.

Scarlet fever caused pink cheeks, full-body rash, and high fever, and all three of us kids had it at the same time. I don’t know why you don’t hear about scarlet fever any more, because there’s still no vaccine. I looked it up.

It was a pretty scary disease for our parents, because it used to be a leading cause of death in children, in the first part of the twentieth century. By the 1960s it meant two weeks home from school, saltine crackers and ginger ale, and having the black and white tv from mom and dad’s bedroom wheeled into your room on a cart, so that you could spend the whole day watching game shows, like the original Candid Camera.

Candid Camera was a show whose punchline was revealing that you had been secretly filmed while subjected to a prank. In those days lawyers hadn’t been invented yet.

With all of us sick with scarlet fever at the same time, we had to take turns with the tv. Otherwise it was a pretty good deal. Kids from your class made Get Well Soon cards out of construction paper and mom picked them up at the school so that we could pretend to look at them, while watching What’s My Line and The Newlywed Game.

What I remember from The Newlywed Game: The host asked the wives individually how many digits their husband had. Three of the four wives looked puzzled and said, One? The fourth one looked puzzled and said, Twenty.

At the beginning of week two of scarlet fever, my mom saw the egg lady coming to the door for her delivery. Mom opened the door to say hello, even though she had left cash in an envelope on top of the tin bread box. On top! Another secure area! Mom said, Thought I would say hi, since I’m home. Three kids with scarlet fever.

The egg lady backed off in horror. Quickly. Put the eggs on the driveway.

I’m never coming to this house again! she exclaimed in a foreign accent. I have no idea where she was from, because Mom did not distinguish. Poland? Germany? Mars? The egg lady said, Fever in your house! You are a bad woman!

After that eggs came from the A&P. And as the recession hit, so did bread and finally, milk.

Now we have InstaCart.

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*InstaCart is a registered trademark of Maplebear, Inc. whose first product was a stuffed bear wearing a maple-leaf t-shirt, reminiscent of the Canadian flag.

**Ziploc is a registered trademark of S.C. Johnson & Son. How weird is it that I knew what polymer the bags were made of, without looking it up? I did look it up to confirm, because it’s important to me to get all of the facts right.

[Below: Back-of-the-envelope Punnett square calculation to address the brown/blue eyes question. Upside-down so you can't cheat.]