Remember loyalty cards?

You remember them, surely?  If you used them at the Acme, you could get 10 cents off of a can of beans.  At the Regal Theater, you got free popcorn.  It was effortless, if not brainless.  You didn't even have to bring the card with you; they could look up your phone number.

Well, those days are over.  Loyalty cards now represent an educational opportunity.  You have to use your brain--never an attractive option for me.  Now you have to go to the website of the loyalty card--let's say it's Plenti--log on, get yourself a username and a password, and then--but I never got that far, so I never got anything out of my Plenti card.

I haven't given up hope.  So today, I used my Plenti card at the gas station, and what do you know, the brain inside the pump asked me if I wanted to use the $12 I had on my Plenti card.  Did I ever?  I pressed yes, and proceeded to pump gas into the car.  However, the receipt said I couldn't use the Plenti points to buy gas.  But I got 8 more Plenti points.

Whole Foods also has a Rewards card.  Yesterday the cashier at my local Whole Foods advised me to just spend an hour familiarizing myself with the card, but that's an hour I will never get back.  Furthermore, I don't want to give Whole Foods my e-mail address and get lots of spam messages from the company offering me free range chickens.  I don't want to sign up.  I don't want an app on my iPhone.  I want 10 cents off a can of beans or free popcorn without making a gigantic mental effort.  Is that too much to ask?

I hate healthy food.

I don't really go for the whole healthy food vibe. There are too many cars in the parking lot with "Coexist!" bumper stickers on fancy cars that I could never afford. Also I am a great fancier of genetically modified food. I go to Whole Foods weekly because I like Brown Cow yogurt, the unhealthy, bad-for-you full fat kind with cream on top. Yum! It's probably the most unhealthy thing you can buy in the place.

I needed bread, so with great trepidation I checked out the bread department. The bread department is where the health food fanatics really let themselves go. The selections were awful. None of them were anything my ancestors would have recognized as bread. No challah! And no rye bread! I could understand this if the store were in Utah, but we're talking Philadelphia suburbs here. Anyway, I was too lazy to go elsewhere, so I bought some 7 grain stuff.

This bread--I was going to say it tastes nasty, but that would be unjust. It doesn't taste nasty; it doesn't taste like anything. It is the anti-taste. If you make a tuna fish sandwich out of it, it kills the taste of the tuna fish. Likewise with egg salad. You can't taste the butter on your buttered toast. And you can't taste the bacon on a blt. Criminal!

But what does it really taste like, you ask? Well, when I was a child in school I used to chew on Faber #2 pencils. This bread tastes sort of like that. Without the lead, of course.