okay maybe this is just because im a millenial/gen z but the longer i’m an adult doing adult things the more i’m kind of weirded out by the decisions companies make when breeding produce for (big box) grocery stores. like i swear that i remember a time when i was younger when everything was just…normal sized at those same stores, and they all looked pretty good but weren’t perfect, and now i SWEAR it’s just hit a point in the past couple years where i go to the store and see these things and it triggers the same plant uncanny valley feel i get from looking at fossil plants.
like, i get that the point is that you get more for less, but i….really just don’t want more? like i just want to get my normal sized produce i can use the entire amount of and leave? i almost feel weird about it, too, because i’m sure there was a time when the idea of county-fair-award-winning-sized blemish-free bell peppers available en masse from the local grocery store for $1 would have been absolutely mind blowing utopian shit, and i’ll admit as a plant person it’s an impressive feat of both farming and logistics if you stand back and think about it, but…why? like when i inevitably can’t use all of x thing it just feels wasteful, and then theres the question of if this is just like, normal now? forever? like are future generations that don’t get exposed to farmers’ markets and stuff going to think that these are normal sized fruits and vegetables? these absolute units just inexplicably dominating the produce section? those fruits and vegetables???
like to be completely honest, i saw the most beautiful tomatoes at the store today. absolutely flawless and literally not a spot on them. some of the best tomatoes ive ever seen anywhere and i took pictures of them to send to my dad….but they came in these boxes of two tomatoes each, split with another piece of cardboard in between, with plastic wrapped around it all to effectively restrain each tomato in its own hell prison solitary confinement, and there was this disclaimer at the top of the rack that said that some vegetables they sold were coated in edible vegetable-derived wax?? like i have never seen produce packed into individual little squares like box shelf candy apples before and it just jarred me and now i see a dark future where all produce is packaged like that to make it as perfectly pristine as possible. im dying inside, im withered. the tomatoes look fantastic, like the kind of thing you’d see at the state fair, but at what cost? dear god? at what cost?
so yeah this is an absolutely frenzied rant here but i get that it’s A Thing that people like to buy produce that looks good, right. like that’s an ongoing theme with breeding produce for sale is how to make things last and look better for longer (same with meat); for example, if you have a batch of tomatoes that are beautiful, those are the ones you want to sell at the grocery store, and the ones with blemishes are better used for ketchup and stuff where they’re not on display. but why. pray tell, why are we breeding these absolute units. why are we coating them in wax and putting them in special little boxes like tomato santa. why are we assuming that people just want the most ass blasting huge produce imaginable in any context at any time. im going stupid im going crazy
ok i slightly misremembered this (they don’t have cardboard separating them and instead are just shoved two per tomato torture chamber coming down together hand in unlovable hand) but look at this. who wants this. who
early homo sapiens b like help i cant stop making bowls . help i cant stop domesticating plants and animals. help i cant stop developing language and architecture and religion
ok im obsessed w this tag
once in grade 6 I saw a ‘pottery making club’ in a ditch on the schoolyard- I assume at some point someone realized there was actually good quality clay in the ditch and when I walked up there were about a dozen 12 year olds sitting around the few girls who had brought their water bottles out to mix the clay, and a designated spot to put the finished bowls and tablets, and people going off and collecting sticks to make designs with and i really think that’s the natural state of the human race
In elementary school I learned that you can make paint out of certain sedimentary rocks on the playground if you crushed them and mixed with water and at one point I had up to 25 kindergarten through third graders making cave paintings on the underside of the slides
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