That way lies madness.
Grapes
I rejected the first bag of red grapes I picked up at Cub yesterday. I don’t know why. Visual inspection indicated possible lack of freshness, we’ll say. It’s not unusual for me to pass over one collection of grapes for another, but this time I got stuck in a loop, critically evaluating about a half dozen bags. They just didn’t seem to be bursting with excitement. Once I’d rejected a few for vague and uncertain reasons, I felt that I owed it to myself to find one that was significantly better-seeming than the rejects, but none of them inspired me. I became worried that I might have to walk away with grapes that failed to meet my stringent quality requirements. (Namely, that they should appear to be bursting with excitement.)
I knew I would walk away with some grapes. They were free grapes with this week’s coupons, and even without that incentive, red grapes are a core item in my house. They are a cornerstone of my daily five servings of fruits and vegetables. A sub-par bunch of grapes creates such disenchantment in contrast to the joy delivered by good grapes.
Fortunately, red grapes are of passable quality all year round.
The grapes you see in the picture are not the grapes I eventually selected. They are free grapes from an earlier trip in the week. I don’t know how much agony their choice represented for my wife. In discussing my struggle with her, she revealed that she incorporates tactile analysis in her own grape vetting process, something that could only exacerbate my issues.
Cucumbers
Cucumbers present fewer problems. As long as they’re not too dried up. Or banged up. Or too soft. Or too small. I prefer larger cucumbers since it is less work to slice off fewer pieces for salads, and larger slices work better on sandwiches.
Sometimes when I’m standing there evaluating my cucumber options, I wonder about the people that zip in and are out moments later with their cucumber. Do they know something I don’t? Do they just not care? And sometimes when I’m at the checkout lane, I wonder if other people or the cashier have any opinions about the cucumbers that have met with my approval.
Bananas
Bananas are another key part of my fruit and vegetable day. I have one every morning. They present one of the larger inventory management challenges in produce maintenance, with their rapid cycling through too-green/just-right/too-blech. Keeping the right balance of yellow and green bananas in stock can be tricky, of course, and even more so when you manage to hit the banana department on an all yellow or all green day.
Occasionally I’ll take a clump of bananas without modification, but more often I abandon at least one or two. Sure, the banana bunch may be one big happy family, but you just know a couple of them aren’t carrying their weight. They’re harboring unsightly brown bruises under the surface, or will be shortly. Since this isn’t always easy to determine, I get the same sense of arbitrariness as with the grapes, along with the inescapable feeling that I’m doing something wrong. What of those cast-offs? Do people pick them up? I certainly don’t want somebody else’s rejects.
Apples
Apples are a true workhorse of the fruit kingdom, and a welcome relief from the pressures of the selection process. It’s just not that hard to pick a good Braeburn apple. Most days. If there is a day that you can’t find a good half-dozen apples, that is a very bad produce day. The main challenge is in choosing apples that our apple corer can handle. You’d think apple corer technology would keep up with apple growing technology, but this apparently is not the case.
