One Day I Will Buy a Deli Meat Shaver and It Will Be Great (Maybe)
Cold cuts for everyone!
At most grocery stores, the deli counter offers you a “test” first slice of meat. This is primarily done to see if you’re OK with the thickness of the slice, but they probably figure hey, while it’s here you might as well get a free taste out of it. This is, without fail, the best your deli meat will ever taste.
It’s so good, in fact, that it makes me wonder why I don’t have my own damn deli slicer.
Consider the following.
Deli meat is a lot like a new car. As soon as you drive it out of the lot, it immediately begins to depreciate in value. Unlike cars, however, this is a completely unnecessary sunk cost. You can drive a car for years. You can maybe, maybe, get a good week out of deli meat. But after a week, the quality of your chosen cold cut has really fallen off.
The taste of freshly sliced deli meat is in a whole other ballpark. It’s obviously fresher, but it also completely lacks any hint of the sliminess that, let's be honest, is on your slices by at least day three. Maybe. I don’t know. To be honest, after a couple of days I just start to get the fear of that slime crawling over my cold cuts and suddenly any hint of an appealing taste is gone. Anxiety sucks.
That’s not to say that I will throw away all the meat — I’m aware that this is mostly in my head. What I’ll do instead is just kind of chew my sandwich through clenched jaws. After a week has passed though, that slime turkey goes in the trash. Just can’t be helped.
So why no deli slicer? Why can’t we, as a collective people, enjoy these over-the-counter fresh meats all the time?
Is it the cost? Well according to Amazon, a fairly well-reviewed slicer runs a little under $80. Kind of expensive, I guess, but not a deal-breaker, especially when it means a lifetime of fresh cuts. Even after adding the suggested lubricant and gloves into your cart only sees the cost increase by $15. A cool $100? Eh, I could live with it.
Maybe then it’s how you go about procuring the meat. The deli has these huge, wrapped packages of the stuff. Where do you get those? I imagine you can probably just buy the full thing from the grocery store itself, or contact a dealer. I admit, though, that this does require a level of dedication and risks potential embarrassment. Let’s say I’m attempting the former.
72!? 72?!
Hi, yes, 72. I will take… all your black pepper turkey breast. Uncut. Just hand it to me.
No way that isn’t weird. However, this does seem like a scenario that, while awkward at first, will probably settle into something normal after a few times. It could even become a fun thing when the deli workers get to know you as that crazy person who buys whole chunks of meat! Yay!
So is it the Kramer thing? You’ve seen Seinfeld; I know it. Kramer buys a deli slicer and its really silly because he wears the deli white jacket and Elaine has him use it to keep a cat fed in her next-door neighbor’s apartment because she killed the power to the neighbor’s apartment to turn off an alarm clock that wouldn't stop playing music but then it accidentally turned off the cat’s automatic feeder and I guess that's about it.
In the end, the episode treats it as a Kramer eccentricity. Who would buy their own deli slicer? Oh, only Kramer would do that! He had to trade some guy for it, that silly haired man!
Of course, today, as I already mentioned, you can easily buy a deli slicer on Amazon for a relatively low cost. It’s not that weird, really. It’d be a pretty cool thing to have if you ask me.
So fuck Seinfeld. I’ll get a deli meat slicer if I feel like it.
Will I really though? Probably not. Maybe, slightly, because it is $100 and I clearly don’t know enough about the extra costs that go into maintaining it. There would be surprises, to say the least. Then there's the probable embarrassment I’d feel when buying that huge loaf of meat from the deli counter. It’d also likely be more difficult than I’ve fully considered to actually use the thing, and I’d definitely cut myself using it. Plus, then I’m stuck with a huge amount of one particular meat. I’ll for sure get tired of eating that.
The main reason I won’t buy one, though, is I simply lack the counter space.
