The commodities box

by David Benjamin

“She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.” 

― Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” speech, 15 Feb. 1976

MADISON, Wis. — None of my high-school friends were poor enough to be on “welfare.” Ironically, because there were no fellow “dependents” among my crowd, I didn’t see myself as poor. Besides, welfare had its silver linings, foremost among which was the commodities box.

The Sixties were sort of a golden age for Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), which was my personal branch of The Dole. This was before the Gipper spun the bigoted myth of the Welfare Queen, which he presented as a sly cabal of single mothers—including my mom—who were swindling wide-eyed, bleeding-heart U.S. government functionaries out of billions of dollars of honest white Americans’ taxes. Mom, for example, raked in, every month, a whopping $300.

Well, sort of. If ADC spies found out she was earning, say, $250 a month, after withholding (she paid taxes, she was white, but never mind that), her monthly government windfall shrank to, yes, $50. Aware of Mom’s dilemma, her boss, Clyde, contrived a fiendish scam on Uncle Sam. He paid her not in cash but in credit for appliances from his store on South Park Street. When Mom’s accumulated wages equaled the price of, say, a brand new GE kitchen range, Clyde sent one over to our apartment on Simpson Street. Thereafter, Mom—the welfare cheat—would begin building up equity on a new refrigerator. 

Poor we were, but we had a space-age kitchen!

However, lacking an actual paycheck from Clyde, how might Mom afford the food to cool in our state-of-the-art icebox and to warm on our gleaming range?

The bureaucrats of ADC, bless their tiny hearts, had Mom’s back. The state didn’t want my big sister Peg, my kid brother Bill and me to literally starve. So, once a month, after her shift at Clyde’s and before she clocked in at Leske’s Supper Club to wait on tables (sixty cents an hour plus tips), Mom would queue up at the welfare office downtown and collect the commodities box.

When Mom brought it home, Peg, Bill and I would rummage, curiously if not ravenously, through the ADC carton of castoff victuals to see if there were any surprises—corned beef, for example (which happened once), or an inexplicable can of baby corn or ripe olives. Otherwise, the menu was predictable—always a bag of navy beans, some flour, maybe a box of cornmeal, but never any sugar. There might be a pound of uncolored oleomargarine but not butter. No chocolate, no ice cream, not even a jar of popcorn, and never any fruit or fresh greens. 

Hardly a cornucopia. But for me, there were two delicacies that crowned very commodities box: canned “Argentine beef” and, ah!… the Yellow Brick.

I’m not sure why I assumed the beef was from Argentina. There must have been some hint on the label. How and why the Wisconsin Welfare Department became so abundantly stocked with surplus Patagonian protein is a mystery never solved. Nor did I investigate. Here in my lap was a gift steer that I wasn’t prone to look it in the mouth.

Besides, I was patriotically pleased with the revelation that the steers of Argentina were vastly inferior to our native Herefords and Anguses. I figured this out by simply opening the can, wherein shreds and pockets of probable beef lurked temptingly within a congealed mass of grayish fat and wiry gristle. 

While Mom despaired of making anything edible from a can of Argentine beef, I—the Escoffier of welfare cuisine—improvised. After sliding the contents out of the can intact, a sort of bûche de la graisse, I sliced it into patties. Then, slowly sautéeing these grease-disks, allowing them to bubble luxuriantly in their own pungent juices, I fashioned a sort of hamburger. The gristle and the odd sliver of bone proved a little hard to chew—Peg covered her nose and hid in her room when I fried Argentine beef—but hey! My wild bullburgers of the Pampas turned out pretty darn tasty. After all, as Steve Goodman once said, “Fat is where it’s at.” 

Luckily, in any given commodities box, we only got a can or two of Argentine beef. Had we received more, Bill and I would have likely succumbed to morbid obesity and arteriosclerosis before we were old enough to die in Vietnam.

Above all, when the box landed, I claimed as mine its piece de resistance: the Yellow Brick. I might have shared it, grudgingly, with Peg and/or Bill. But they both demurred. A five-pound slab—four inches square and fourteen inches long—of low-grade surplus Wisconsin cheddar, the mighty Brick was, for five years of my decade on welfare, the pillar of my diet. 

Mom, of course, brought groceries home from the Sentry store, ’til the last week of the month when cash ran out, and she did her Betty Crocker best to feed us. I pitched in occasionally by learning a few simple dishes—spaghetti, a sort of goulash, a tuna-pasta-pea salad that I still prepare. When not at home—which was often—I mooched dozens (hundreds?) of proletarian meals (pork chops or minute steaks, mashed potatoes, cream-style corn) from my best friend Dick’s mom. I also grazed on 25-cent McDonald’s burgers after football games in Dick’s Chevy or Webster’s jalopy. The Yellow Brick, however, was there for me when all other provender was either exhausted, spoiled, elsewhere or prohibitively dear.

In eighth grade, in a flash of ingenuity inspired by the Brick, I devised the ADC Cheese Sandwich. This wasn’t quite Julia Child. To make it, I would saw off the Brick a quarter-inch of cheese—whose texture evoked freshly-mixed, recently-spread, high-quality concrete. I then laid the yellow slab (sometimes on a plate, often just on the kitchen counter) between two slices of Gardner’s white bread. No mustard, no mayo, no oleo. I poured a glass of milk and, as a flourish, cut my ADC Cheese Sandwich diagonally. Then, into the living room to flick on the TV (ideally, just in time for “Rocky and Bullwinkle” or “The Outer Limits”) and dine on the tab of a beneficent government and on the vast dairy surplus of a state whose Guernseys and Holsteins outnumbered German Catholics, Dutch Reformers and other bipeds by several hundred thousand head. 

In five years of ADC Cheese Sandwiches, I personally prevented at least 300 pounds of unwanted curds-and-whey from winding down the Lemonweir River toward an undeserving Iowa. 

At first blush, beholding it amongst lesser commodities, the Yellow Brick always seemed too huge to ever consume. But a week before the new box came—and who knew, from a capricious and opaque bureaucracy, if there would be another (or if Mom might forget to pick it up)—I was thinning my slices and rationing my cheddar, like a junkie cutting my horse with bicarbonate of soda.

In his incomparable novel, Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan recalls a childhood friend who made a version of Kool-Aid, dissolving a single packet of powder in a gallon of water, without sugar. The result was a pallid quarter-strength facsimile of the sweet, bright-red pitchers of Kool-Aid, clinking with ice and drooling with condensation, in TV commercials.

It was barely Kool-Aid. But it was his, there was lots of it, and it was going to last ’til he got hold of another precious packet.

I either knew that kid, or he was me. If we’d lived next-door, we would have had a picnic every hot afternoon—the envy of our neighborhood—sitting on the stoop noshing welfare cheese and swilling adulterated cherry water.