Tuesday, June 18, 2002

My new favorite store is Wild Oats. This is a small chain of "organic" grocery stores, which is based in Boulder, Colorado. I stopped by after work tonight to pick up some stuff to cook. I plan to make shabu-shabu for some guests Thursday night. Major observation: you can apparently make soy beans into every imaginable shape, texture, and flavor. Soy milk takes up two sections of the store (refrigerated and not). It greatly outpaces the space alloted for cow's milk. It is available in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and "original" whatever that is. The space devoted to soy milk is dwarfed, however, by that reserved for tofu. Tofu comes in a numbing array of styles and flavors. It can masquerade as cheese or meat or even ice cream. Soy mayonnaise? You bet! The only kind of soy I could not find at Wild Oats was, believe it or not, regular old soy beans. Fortunately I have some of those in my freezer - edamame. Over to the deli, and guess what ... more tofu! Sometimes known as tempeh. Hidden in with sesame noodles. Flagrantly impersonating mozzerella. Stop the insanity! I wheeled my cart to the checkout, abundantly full of natural goodness. Eightly dollars worth in fact. But there were problems. The totally natural looking, patchouli-wearing, sandal-footed check out clerk did not know her veggies, a cardinal sin. She stared quizzically at a bag of tomatilla. She asked me what they were, but this was not enough. She needed to look up the register code, but first had to decide if they were fruits or vegetables. Now you must believe me that I did not want to prolong the agony, but I felt compelled to say that while they are technically fruits, she would probably find them filed in her book under vegetables, and she did. This prompted her to ask me how this issue is decided, and I gave her the whole seed-case explanation. At this point she had pretty much stopped ringing up my order and was thinking up objects on which to quiz me about fruit/vegetable classification. Tomatoes? Fruit. Eggplants? Yes those as well. Here she interjected that even though she was curious as to the fruit nature of eggplant, she actually hates the taste, which reminds her of Windex. hmm. She reached for another object. Oh dear. It's bok choy I told her, and she dutifully looked up the code. She told me that her maternal step mother (I think) is Japanese and that she used to carve cute little animal figures out of baby bok choy. Next item: again no clue. Leeks, I said. She had no humorous aphorism about leeks. I thought about making a pun, but thought better of it. 11:14:08 PM

I enjoyed reading this article about Bush policy on bioethics: Playing God. Bush's bioethics czar Leon Kass wants to criminalize lifesaving medical research as violating the natural order of things. Would he have opposed wiping out smallpox? [Salon.com] 10:39:39 PM

For my Canadian friends: P. J. O'Rourke. "Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen." [Quotes of the Day] 1:05:41 AM

© Copyright 2002 Bob Messerschmidt.