The Joy of Purity

Joe Broadmeadow

There are three things in this world that should never be changed. Ice cream should be vanilla. Pizza should have anchovies. And Cheez-Its should be just Cheez-Its.

I hold these truths the way other men hold mortgages—reluctantly at first, then with a grim permanence that outlasts every argument for refinancing. I did not choose them. They accumulated on me somewhere north of forty, the way barnacles accumulate on a hull that has stopped moving, and now they are structural.

Start with vanilla, because it is easiest, and because you open with the easy one to build the jury’s confidence before you get to the part where your client was, technically, at the scene.

Vanilla is not the absence of flavor. This is the great slander of the age, repeated by people who have never read a label. Vanilla is an orchid. It is pollinated by hand, one blossom at a time, on a schedule so unforgiving that the entire global supply hinges on whether somebody in Madagascar got out of bed. Vanilla is the single most labor-intensive flavor humanity has ever agreed to produce, and we use its name as a synonym for boring. Meanwhile “birthday cake” is an industrial accident that got a marketing budget, and “cookie dough” is a public health advisory sold by the pint.

There is a reason every ice cream parlor in America puts vanilla at the far end of the case. It is the control group. It is the flavor against which fraud is detected. Hand me a scoop of vanilla and I can tell you inside of one bite whether the operation is honest.

Now. Anchovies.

I know what you are going to say. You are going to say that anchovies are not a default but an imposition. You are going to say a fish cured in salt and sealed in a tin the approximate size and mood of a hockey puck cannot possibly be the standard-issue configuration of anything, much less a food that children are permitted to eat at parties. You are going to say I have taken a minority position and dressed it in the robes of natural law.

To which I answer: the Romans put fish sauce on everything they ate, and they built roads you can still drive on. We put ranch on everything, and we cannot keep a bridge standing through a mild winter. Draw your own conclusions. I have drawn mine.

Understand also that the anchovy does not linger. It dissolves. It goes into the heat and comes out as nothing you can point to, leaving behind only the settled conviction that the pizza is better and no evidence whatsoever as to why. Twenty years of interviews taught me to recognize that profile immediately. The anchovy is the perfect witness. It does the work, and it is not in the room when the defense wants to cross-examine.

Which brings us, finally, to the cracker.

The Cheez-It arrived in 1921 and was, on arrival, finished. Square. Orange. A hole in the middle for reasons nobody has ever adequately explained and nobody has ever needed to explain. Salted to the exact threshold where a reasonable adult loses the ability to stop. This was not a product that required development. This was a product that required a lid.

Instead we got White Cheddar. We got Extra Toasty, which is not a flavor but a confession—an admission, printed on a red box and distributed nationally, that the original was undercooked for a hundred years and nobody said anything. We got Grooves, on the theory that a cracker was insufficiently corrugated. We got Snap’d, which took the hole out. We got Puff’d, which took the cracker out. We got Duoz, a name suggesting the marketing department has begun rationing vowels, and somewhere in there we got a Cheez-It that tastes like a different snack food entirely, which is not innovation but hostage-taking.

A company achieved perfection in the first quarter of the twentieth century and has spent the hundred years since unable to sit still. I find this the saddest thing I know about American industry, and I have read about American industry.

Someone will point out, probably at a family function, probably holding a slice of something with pineapple on it, that two of my three commandments are baselines and the third is just a thing I happen to like. That vanilla and the plain cracker can be defended as original states, while the anchovy is a preference wearing a badge it was never issued.

This is a fair observation. It is also the whole point, and I will not be conceding it.

Purity was never a conclusion anybody reasoned their way toward. Nobody assembles the evidence, weighs it, and arrives at the position that a small oily fish is load-bearing. You arrive at these things around fifty, in the aisle of a supermarket, standing in front of a display that has replaced the thing you came in for with four things wearing its name, and something in you decides that this is where it stops. Not everywhere. Just here. Just these three.

So, the freezer holds vanilla. The tin is in the cabinet, behind the good olive oil, waiting. And the box on the shelf is red and says nothing but Cheez-It, no adjective, no apostrophe standing in for a missing letter, no promise of anything beyond what has been reliably delivered since Warren G. Harding was president.

Three things holding still in a world that will not. That is the joy of it—and it was never meant to be a door anybody gets turned away at. Come by on a Sunday. The tin stays in the cabinet, the pizza comes however you want it, and I will scoop you something out of the vanilla without one word of commentary.

Levi and Wyatt will get to the box before you do. They will take the red one because the red one is what is on the shelf, and they will eat it standing up with the door open, and it will not occur to either of them that anything is being handed over. That is the correct way to receive it. Nobody ever accepted a conviction that arrived with a lecture attached.

But somewhere out ahead of them, thirty or forty years from a Sunday afternoon in Warren, one of those boys is going to be standing in an aisle in front of four crackers wearing the same name, and something is going to go quiet and stubborn in his chest, and he will not be able to explain it to anyone either.

Good. Let him not explain it. That is how these things get passed down.