Kara & Michael’s Blog

If you’ve never come with me to a grocery store or to pick up produce, you will have no idea how positively anal I am about fruits and veggies. I had never really eaten many fruits or vegetables when I began working at my first job at an orchard. I learned to spy what decay looked like in its many forms. The smell of brown spinach, the bit of wrinkling and puckering on peppers, the tiny bruises on ripe peaches that quickly disintegrate into oozing sores, the way that overripe plums tend to spill juices through their stem or blossom ends rather than through bruises.

But I became particularly intimate with tomatoes. The tomatoes we sold were “local” but not grown within Maryland (we did sell some Maryland-grown heirlooms, but most of our tomatoes were hot-house tomatoes). We got stacks and stacks of copier-paper sized cases of tomatoes every week. And every week, we would have to sort them. It was a good quiet job, a job you could sit on a bucket or overturned jelly-case and muse about life while doing.

One rainy November afternoon, I took it upon myself to sort tomatoes. The stack of cases was emanating fruit flies and the scent of rotten vegetable matter. I knew I was going to come across some problem cases (one rotten tomato tended to spoil most of the box) and within the first box, I picked up a tomato and my fingers went through the bottom of it.

But that isn’t the tomato that scarred me. I was through several problem boxes when I opened up one of the last boxes I had to do and a swarm of flies rose into my face. I looked down into the newly uncovered tomatoes and something was very wrong with one. The skin was a translucent pink and the guts were grayish with black spots. It was something I had never seen before and as I sat mesmerized, I saw that the inside of the tomato was swaying. The grayish with black spots insides were maggots. As they crawled over each other, barely contained by the swelling tomato skin, I held back vomit. I backed away and into the kitchen area of the store, taking a few breaths. I grabbed an enormous trashcan, and threw the whole case of tomatoes away, quickly sealing up the trash bag and setting the trash can aside. Then I finished up the rest of the tomato cases, most of which were fine. I went home and ate some tomato on a salad. Obviously, it didn’t scar me that much. But it did make me particularly careful about produce.

Well, today I picked up our CSA. and we got a baggy of tomatoes. And I was a little irritated because the two big tomatoes were both rotten and growing the white mold tomatoes grow. Tomatoes that grow mold are automatically out of the running to be eaten, at least by my standards. Where I worked, I tossed those ones as not even good enough for seconds (unlike bruised or soft tomatoes).

I don’t expect we will do the CSA next year, vowing instead to check out the Farmer’s Market. At least I can pick out produce suitable for my perfectionist non-moldy tendencies. Also, I can decide not to eat corn every single week. We got ten ears this week. We’re only two people, and corn is hardly a vegetable. I don’t know what to do with all this dang corn.

Oh, and this morning we found a baby bird dying on our doorstep. We picked it up with a newspaper and then laid it outside under a bush. It was gone when I came back from dropping Michael at the bus. It probably got eaten. I don’t know what was wrong with it, presumably it hurt itself falling from the inside of our ceiling where they nest and then crawled away from the outside and people coming in and out by shuttering itself in our doorway. Poor thing.

I never know what to do in those situations. Because what I want to do is hold the bird and nurse it back to health on peanut butter and sunflower seeds and my tender embrace. But this is a wild bird, and even if I could nurse it back to health (unlikely), it could never survive outdoors again. It would be stuck inside, alone, with only an evil predator to keep it company. Plus, Inari would probably figure out how to open its cage, just like she did the fish tank.

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