Thoughts From the Grocery Store #2

 

My new blog series Thoughts From the Grocery Store continues this week with a few thoughts about buying fresh fruit and vegetables. Or is that fruits and vegetables? I never know. Google disagrees on this. Anyhow, to read the first part in this series, about self-checkouts, you can find it here.

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#2 - Groping the Veg

 

Being choosy is pretty natural in the produce section of the grocery store. I know we're all supposed to be buying ugly fruit and veg to reduce food waste and all that, and the thing is I totally agree with that, but I am shallow and I am human. Sure, I get it, ugly tomatoes are people too. But my garden has plenty of those knobbly, half-ripe tomatoes on the vines come early September. I slice them up or sauce them or turn them into relish because, well, I have kind of grown attached to them all summer.

But the reality of it is when in the grocery store and presented with the option between a gnarly tomato and a shiny, plump one, I'll take home the pretty one. Every time. It's normal, I think, even natural. We are judgy about food, just as Mother Nature or God or Darwin or whatever intended, so we eat food that won't poison us.

I have this thing about buying cucumbers. I like them to be uniformly thick the full length of the cucumber. I mean, who wants tiny bread and butter pickles and big round mushy pickles in the same jar? This picky woman doesn't, that's who. So, I look at the cucumbers on offer carefully. I pick one up, wrap a hand around it snugly, slide my hand up and down the full length of it to make sure there aren't any soft spots. I turn it over in my hands, then put it back and feel up and down another one until I find the right cuke.

Now, I get what this could look like. I wasn't born yesterday. I get that another shopper who just happens to be wandering through the produce department with their filthy mind might think I'm testing for girth. And, actually, I am. Just not for non-eating reasons. They may assume (perhaps with a tinge of admiration) that I am simply a vivacious woman in my late thirties looking for something to get me through those lonely nights, the big perverts that they are.

 

But I swear to you I have no lusty designs on the cucumbers. Same goes for the zucchinis, the bananas, and other oblong fruits and vegetables in the grocery store. It's simply natural human instinct to want to put only the best in my mouth.

 

What?! Oh, just stop it.

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Check back soon for more Thoughts From the Grocery Store when I'll be sharing a story about that time I accidentally got a deep-conditioning nasal treatment in the shampoo aisle.