There are few places more replete with capitalistic wonder than the frozen foods section at Walmart. Each store boasts its own collection of giant, identical freezers filled with a truly dizzying array of snacks and entrees, all perfectly encased in a light layer of frost. The quotidian frozen vegetables and fake meat patties take up shelf space right alongside the fantastical SpongeBob SquarePants-shaped popsicles and cheese-stuffed soft pretzel sticks.
As such, strolling down these aisles, especially during the hottest days of the Texas summer, is an ideal pastime — especially when paired with the cannabis gummy of your choice. After consuming a Sundae Flowers mochi gummy (in the lychee dragon flavor, if you must know) there is no experience more entertaining than slipping on your best comfy pants and wandering down the frozen food aisles in search of some kind of meaning — and snacks.
This must, unfortunately, take place at a Walmart. A typical supermarket frozen foods aisle is too practical, too reasonable. The Walmart frozen foods aisle is where one goes to dream.
Maybe, when you first push your cart into those artificially cooled aisles, you’ll spot the Totino’s Pizza Rolls that you lived on during the summers as a kid, or the frozen burritos that kept you alive in college. Nostalgia is a key component of this stroll; as you peruse the frozen dinners, you’ll remember the glory days of Kid Cuisines, when your dinner came with a tiny — if not very good — brownie baked directly into the tray alongside a portion of chicken nuggets and mac and cheese. You will inevitably throw a few bags of those Pizza Rolls into your cart, get heartburn, and forget about them until the next time you find yourself extremely stoned and snacky in the middle of a grocery store.
Nostalgia is a great place to start, but it’s not the only destination in the Wal-Mart frozen foods aisle. Next comes sheer wonder, you will be confronted by a veritable smorgasbord of “how the fuck did they pull this off?” No part of the grocery store is a better showcase of absurdist innovation than these shelves, if only thanks to whoever figured out how to make cupcakes out of pizza. You will wonder how, exactly, the crust of those steak nacho Hot Pockets became “nacho spice blasted,” and not only because those gummies have left you, too, a little blasted. But that understanding will never come — the frozen food aisles aren’t here to offer you answers, only more questions.
As such, they’re the perfect place to wander when you find yourself in a creative rut. I do some of my best thinking when I’m surrounded by long rows of glass-enclosed freezers. Compared to the hustle and bustle of the grocery store, the aisles are quiet and contemplative, perfect for brainstorming your next big idea. Think your ideas are all crap? Well, maybe they are considering that you weren’t the guy who first thought to put pizza on a bagel. But when you see exactly how many Bagel Bites imitators there are on these shelves — even “healthy” ones, yuck! — you may finally feel like a true original. Or at least grateful that you’re not the weirdo who thought that freezing an entire Philly cheesesteak sandwich, bun and all, was actually a good idea. But maybe, as you browse the nuggets and frozen diet food dinners, you will have a true stroke of genius, a little lightning bolt of inspiration brought to you directly by a towering shelf of Blue Bell ice cream bars.
This is also an excellent opportunity to fill your own freezer with all the snacks that look just strange enough to try. The frozen foods aisle is a place to be daring, to give into your most curious whims. I spent years wondering whether or not those frozen White Castle sliders could really be any good, and decided on one recent jaunt to finally throw a box in my cart. Regrettably, they were pretty terrible — a soggy, pale imitation of a proper slider, even one from a fast food chain — but at least now I know that for sure. As in life, not all of your experimentation will work out, but there are decidedly more expensive and painful ways to learn that important life lesson than wasting $7 on a box of crappy frozen burgers.
As you wind down your wandering, your nostalgia and curiosity thoroughly satisfied and your edible fully kicked in, pursuit of a little sweet treat is the final, and perhaps most important, objective. Frozen desserts are true scientific marvels, and even though I don’t want to know the chemical magic behind a Carvel ice cream cake, I absolutely want to eat one. There is so much to choose from — my Walmart has cake pops, macarons, cheesecake, fudge cakes, and mini cream puffs. There are icy slices of banana wrapped in both Reese’s peanut butter and chocolate, a real snack trifecta. Most often, I settle for a pint of Van Leeuwen, but I am not above buying myself an entire Edwards chocolate cream pie just to eat the weird dollops of “whipped cream” on top that somehow never get fully frozen solid.
Once I have selected my various snacks and a little treat and paid at the register, I’m thrust back into the real — and really hot — world. But following those brief moments of wandering — and stealing as much of that super-cold air from the freezer cases as I can — I am revitalized. This may sound like the saddest staycation of all time, and perhaps it is, but we all deserve to insert a little wonder into the drudgery of keeping ourselves alive, and for my buck, there’s no better way to do that than taking a little trip down the frozen food aisle while also being a little stoned.
Subin Yang is a South Korean illustrator currently based in NYC. She graduated with a BFA in illustration from Pacific Northwest College of Art and makes images using colorful blocky shapes and loose line work inspired by themes of home, culture, and identity.
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