Mini Tacos, Murder, and the Problem of Getting Exactly What We Want

My kids call it the Mini Taco Incident of 2014. It is a sordid tale that displays neither of them at their best, but they have given me permission to share it now for the edification of my readers. 

I had made a tray full of Trader Joe’s mini tacos for dinner that night. These were highly desirable treats for the kids, and I picked up a box or two every time I went to Trader Joe’s. At some point (no camera footage exists) my older child asked permission to get a second helping. Everyone agrees that said permission was granted and said second helping was obtained. Shortly thereafter, the younger child made the same request and was also given permission for a second helping. When this child arrived in the kitchen, however, the tacos had all been eaten.

If you do not have children, it will be hard to convey to you the weeping, the vitriol, and the storms of bitterness and outrage that followed this discovery. Despite the abundance of alternate foodstuffs available, all that mattered that night were the mini tacos. And they were gone. To this day, even as both the children involved approach legal drinking age, any time there is a particularly delicious and somewhat scarce treat in the house, we all warn one another not to repeat the Mini Taco Incident of 2014. And we are only sort of joking.

While this is a fine warning for anyone who might seek to come between my kids and the nearest mini taco, it is a much better way to begin thinking about scarcity—real and imagined—and how we respond to it. That subject has been on my mind lately since I’ve been reading Marisa Kashino’s new thriller Best Offer Wins.

Best Offer Wins is the story of Margo Miyake, who has been house hunting in the DC suburbs for eighteen months. She and her husband Ian have made eleven offers and have been outbid, often in cash, on every single one. Currently living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment that they rented as a temporary bridge between selling their previous home and buying something new, Margo and Ian are increasingly getting on one another’s nerves. When Margo hears about the perfect home two weeks before it lists for sale, the situation begins to boil over.

Without spoiling the remainder of the novel, Margo’s fixation on this single perfect house begins to spiral out of control. She wants the Instagram-worthy decoration. She wants the life lived by the family that owns it. She wants a child like the child who lives there. She even—in a detail that I found particularly unsettling—buys new house numbers for the dream house, before it’s on the market.

There’s long been plenty of literature about greed: Frank Norris’s great American naturalist novel McTeague (which became Stroheim’s classic silent film Greed) begins as a young woman wins $5,000 from a lottery ticket. Her current suitor, McTeague, and former suitor, Marcus, clash over who has the right to her and her new wealth. The windfall becomes a miser’s hoard and devolves into a curse. The final scene of the novel leaves us with a vision of McTeague handcuffed to Marcus’s corpse, dying of thirst in Death Valley, with the useless gold coins in a sack beside him. In Bleak House, Dickens details the wreckage of the lives of everyone involved in the endless legal wrangling over the Jarndyce estate. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair offers us the ghoulish picture of an entire family jockeying for favor with their wealthy matriarch as she dies slowly. As Austen’s Sense and Sensibility opens, we watch John Dashwood’s wife talk him down from leaving his impoverished, widowed sister and her children three thousand pounds to helping them move and sending them an occasional basket of food, in order to preserve intact his own son’s very large inheritance. And Donald Westlake’s The Axe explores a murderous way to solve the problem of a tight job market. Fiction turns out to be a good way to think about scarcity and the greed it inspires, perhaps because these things do not bring out the best in human behavior. Scarce resources (like mini tacos) will always inspire greedy squabbling and discontent. And that conflict will always inspire novelists.

But Margo’s targeted, specific, obsessive desire strikes me as importantly different and possibly even more damaging than greed alone as a simple and instinctive response to scarcity. Scarcity lies at the back of it, of course. There wouldn’t be anything for Margo to obsess about if DC was full of renovated 1940s colonials that look “like they peered inside my mind and extracted the perfect backdrop for the perfect future.” The absurd and violent lengths that Margo is willing to go to in order to get her perfect house are driven by her experiences with poverty and insecure housing as a child, and her recent revisiting of those fears and frustrations in the intensely competitive DC house market. But Margo’s error of judgment (aside from her criminal activities) is to fall into the trap of transforming a scarce good—high quality housing in a desirable DC neighborhood—into a non-substitutable good—the only house that can satisfy her. 

We humans are driven by our preferences, of course. We prefer particular neighborhoods because they offer us things we want—good schools, good restaurants, easy access to downtown, proximity to friends and family, or short commutes. We prefer particular styles of homes because they align with our aesthetic sense of what is beautiful, or they offer us features we love, like fireplaces and screened-in porches, or they accommodate desires we have for ease of living—extra bathrooms, laundry rooms that aren’t in the basement, or a home office. And we cannot help but be drawn to particular decorative choices—whether paint colors or marble countertops. 

We like what we like. That is part of what makes us human. And being able to express those preferences is part of what makes us free, and part of what makes freedom so enjoyable. We are not animals, doomed to always build the same types of shelters as the generations before us. We express ourselves through our choices. Mass-produced Soviet housing, and the American housing developments that inspired Malvina Reynolds to write “Little Boxes,” were bleak experiments in a kind of standardization. They flew in the face of the delight we take in making choices and customizing our options. The recent vogues for tiny homes and home renovation shows both reveal us leaning into customizations and choices of all kinds.

But living among such an abundance of choices, with so many ways to express our many preferences, can make it tempting to dismiss instantly any option that doesn’t fulfill every one of our preferences at the same time. In search of the perfect house, in other words, we may well refuse to consider houses that are perfectly good. Margo narrows her preferences down with such precision that there is one single house that can satisfy her. She takes a tight housing market and turns it into a trap. And she takes a scarce good (nice housing in a good neighborhood of DC) and narrows her vision until she can see only a single unsubstitutable good: The House. In The Neighborhood. 

Margo, in a very real way, creates a scarcity trap for herself. 

Now consider the world of dating. Justin Garcia, director of the Kinsey Institute, reminds us that “both online and off, we tend to reduce potential partners to a list of ‘composite traits’ that aren’t always a reflection of our true desires. And we tend to date aspirationally; research shows that we tend to punch 25 percent ‘above our own weight,’ seeking partners of much higher mate-value than ourselves, which reduces the odds of a successful outcome.” But Wharton professor Pinar Yildirim argues that expanding the pool of potential partners as widely and rapidly as dating apps do actually produces fewer matches. 

Perhaps dating apps haven’t caused a sudden epidemic of narrowed vision and self-inflicted scarcity, but they certainly haven’t done anything to solve it. Dating apps encourage window shopping for partners, but they still want you to believe that the perfect partner (6’2” with marble countertops and a screened porch!) could always be just one more swipe away. Why would you ever settle for less when perfection could be on the next screen? Maybe a seemingly infinite set of choices inspires infinite pickiness. Making the haystack bigger doesn’t make it easier to find that one shiny needle you’re longing for.

Once you start to think about self-inflicted scarcity, you’ll see it everywhere. The college search? Think of the “Varsity Blues Scandal” where parents spent millions of dollars to bribe officials and create fraudulent test scores in order to get their kids into Ivy League universities. Like Margo, they narrowed their vision until they could only see the Perfect School, then became willing to do whatever it took to get it.

Consider, as well, the viral holiday toy. 1996’s “Tickle Me Elmo” insanity may be the most memorable, but every year brings a new frenzy over some toy or another. And not just at Christmas: I once drove myself nearly mad trying to find a “Blue Wind Ninja Storm Ranger” Halloween costume for one of my taco-loving hellions. 

We do it to ourselves. Maybe living with abundance is a new kind of strain for human beings. I would never echo Bernie Sanders’s famous comment about how “You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” But I do wonder if we should start thinking harder about when things are actually scarce, and when we are making ourselves believe that they are, and when we have persuaded ourselves that something is unsubstitutable.

And I know—for certain—that we should guard against those who try to make us panic about scarcity for political reasons. The X feed of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is currently filled with posts saying things like “Want affordable housing? Help report illegal aliens in your area. Call 866-XXX-XXXX.” And this one, with its grim but factually dubious call and response:

Now, there are not tens of millions of criminal illegal aliens in the country; there are about 14 million undocumented immigrants, and the vast majority of them have no criminal convictions. The goal is to ignore those facts, and to make us into Margo, so fixated on the dream of what we want, need, and deserve, and so terrified of the possibility of doing without it, that we are willing to wade into a pool of blood to get it. We don’t have to do that.

There are more mini tacos in the freezer.