Fruit purchased with the best of intentions affects us all. We see those peaches at the roadside farmer’s stand in mid-July and we salivate. “Man, those look good.”
We fill a paper sack with six, maybe a dozen, and bring them home, thinking they’ll be good for a snack at work, and to slap into a peach pie later in the week. Instead, inertia gets in the way.
Monday, you wake up late and pass on breakfast, while forgetting to put anything into your lunch bucket to bring to work. You go out for a soup and half a sandwich, feeling righteous. You end up behind on your project, get home late, stuff your face with some cold pizza and land in the sack with your face down, saliva dripping out the side of your mouth as you pass out at 8:30 p.m.
Tuesday you jump out of bed refreshed, decide to go for a run that takes longer than you expected so you race through your shower and out the door, grabbing a banana, but missing the peaches, which you’ve conveniently stored in a slightly less accessible spot on your kitchen counter that doesn’t register with your morning brain cells. At lunch you’re ravenous, and pound a huge sub at Jersey Mike’s, with all the toppings, chips and a large soft drink. Yum. Burp.
You skip dinner, still full from all those mid-day carbos. Nightmares invade your dreams.
Wednesday is weird from start to finish. You feel off all day, eating lightly, chewing slowly, taking small bites, leaving things on your plate, not even considering that a succulent sweet peach is waiting for you when you get home. Instead, blocked from your mind, you decide to go see the new Jason Bourne movie, slam some popcorn with excess butter, lick your fingers like a cat and drive home contaminating your car with puffs of gas.
No peaches here. By now, your purchase has softened, the perfectly formed and textured fruit still giving off that awesome perfume, but not drawing a bite from you.
Because you feel guilty, you grab a peach first thing Thursday morning and hammer it before realizing the side you bit into is rotten. “Yuck,” you toss it away, spitting out the brown mush, and take another. This one is slightly better, and you eat around the edges, but still, it’s not living up to expectations.
We leave plums out in our fruit baskets until they turn into prunes. Grapes turn aged and ugly, becoming hardened raisins. Peaches go bad. Why do we buy fruit that we should know will never get eaten? We presume we’ll break our habits and consume good, local, fresh fruit because it looks so good, and we KNOW we SHOULD eat it.
But that’s not enough, as experience continually demonstrates. Maybe our subconscious really wants to support local farmers. We know they need the money, so we buy from them way more than we need.
Then it goes bad. Do we forget about the fruit once it gets home? Do we think it will perfectly complement the décor around the stove? Does our impulse to purchase something knew overwhelm our common sense?
We’ll never know. It’s a battle between thinking you’ll actually do something new (like eat some fruit that you typically don’t) and letting inertia take over – sticking to your tried and true food purchases, which you know you’ll chow down.
Today I’m going to buy a bunch of plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines, cherries and kiwis, and gobble them up the instant I get home from the market. Or maybe tomorrow.
We fill a paper sack with six, maybe a dozen, and bring them home, thinking they’ll be good for a snack at work, and to slap into a peach pie later in the week. Instead, inertia gets in the way.
Monday, you wake up late and pass on breakfast, while forgetting to put anything into your lunch bucket to bring to work. You go out for a soup and half a sandwich, feeling righteous. You end up behind on your project, get home late, stuff your face with some cold pizza and land in the sack with your face down, saliva dripping out the side of your mouth as you pass out at 8:30 p.m.
Tuesday you jump out of bed refreshed, decide to go for a run that takes longer than you expected so you race through your shower and out the door, grabbing a banana, but missing the peaches, which you’ve conveniently stored in a slightly less accessible spot on your kitchen counter that doesn’t register with your morning brain cells. At lunch you’re ravenous, and pound a huge sub at Jersey Mike’s, with all the toppings, chips and a large soft drink. Yum. Burp.
You skip dinner, still full from all those mid-day carbos. Nightmares invade your dreams.
Wednesday is weird from start to finish. You feel off all day, eating lightly, chewing slowly, taking small bites, leaving things on your plate, not even considering that a succulent sweet peach is waiting for you when you get home. Instead, blocked from your mind, you decide to go see the new Jason Bourne movie, slam some popcorn with excess butter, lick your fingers like a cat and drive home contaminating your car with puffs of gas.
No peaches here. By now, your purchase has softened, the perfectly formed and textured fruit still giving off that awesome perfume, but not drawing a bite from you.
Because you feel guilty, you grab a peach first thing Thursday morning and hammer it before realizing the side you bit into is rotten. “Yuck,” you toss it away, spitting out the brown mush, and take another. This one is slightly better, and you eat around the edges, but still, it’s not living up to expectations.
We leave plums out in our fruit baskets until they turn into prunes. Grapes turn aged and ugly, becoming hardened raisins. Peaches go bad. Why do we buy fruit that we should know will never get eaten? We presume we’ll break our habits and consume good, local, fresh fruit because it looks so good, and we KNOW we SHOULD eat it.
But that’s not enough, as experience continually demonstrates. Maybe our subconscious really wants to support local farmers. We know they need the money, so we buy from them way more than we need.
Then it goes bad. Do we forget about the fruit once it gets home? Do we think it will perfectly complement the décor around the stove? Does our impulse to purchase something knew overwhelm our common sense?
We’ll never know. It’s a battle between thinking you’ll actually do something new (like eat some fruit that you typically don’t) and letting inertia take over – sticking to your tried and true food purchases, which you know you’ll chow down.
Today I’m going to buy a bunch of plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines, cherries and kiwis, and gobble them up the instant I get home from the market. Or maybe tomorrow.