Trying to be good is hard. Take, for instance, my dinner preparation this evening. In our house we cook, as opposed to heating up and/or mixing together. That means I buy individual ingredients, chop them up, and cook them with a variety of herbs and spices in a variety of ways.
I’m telling you this just in case you weren’t sure what cooking is. I was pretty sure that everyone agreed on the definition till I started having various babysitters “cook” for my children. Hm.
Anyway, I had decided to be “good,” as defined by Dr. Greene, and buy organic potatoes. To tell you the truth, the potatoes I buy are usually organic, but through much of the year I don’t have to buy because we grow more potatoes than four families can eat on my parents’ farm. Those are what I call “semi-organic,” because my chemist dad is not above saying to my mom, “I’m darn tired of those critters chewing on our root crops and I’m gonna go out and dose ’em once and fer all.”
Or something like that.
So our gardens are “usually” organic, but occasionally not.
So, in reference to potatoes, the ones that I buy are usually organic, and usually come in a bag and are those fancy fingerling potatoes, because I like them so much. But this being spring, and new red potatoes being in the store, I just had to buy them today because ours aren’t in yet, and I made myself cross the aisle and get the organic ones.
The price looked OK. I actually didn’t go and compare. Sometimes I do, but if the price for organic seems within reasonable standards, I don’t bother. Sometimes, just to throw you off course, the organics will be cheaper. Really, it does happen. Sometimes the price for organic will be so breathtaking, I’ll have to stop and ponder: are these gold-plated organic potatoes? ‘Cause sometimes, I have to wonder whether they price them way up there just to see if anyone is really watching.
But here’s where being good is hard: they stamp each and every one of those little organic new red potatoes with a bright red “organic” sticker. Do they do this at your grocery store? Does it drive you crazy as it does me? When they first started doing this at the grocery store of my choice, they used little red “organic” stickers that were stuck on with non-water-soluble glue. Now, I am simply the daughter of chemists and not a chemist myself, but I’m guessing that non-water-soluble glue is probably not itself organic. The day after I had to CUT the darn “organic” stickers off the vegetables, I marched into the grocery store and filled out a comment card. Darn it, it totally grosses me out that you use non-water-soluble glue on those stickers! Do you realize that I had to CUT the darn things off my vegetables?
Time bubbles along and the labels are now stuck on with somewhat water-soluble glue. This means that I sat at the sink, warm water running, trying to get each and every red (which dye did they use?) sticker off my darn new potatoes so I could cook my darn healthy Indian curry with new potatoes and chard (organically grown in our garden, most of the time, chewed up by earwigs but still recognizable as very lovely, tender chard).
Is it too much to ask that they make the stickers so they come off easily? I just paid, probably, a premium for these lovely new potatoes, and I’d really like not having to waste a gallon of water and a half an hour of my time getting the stickers off.
Sheesh. It really isn’t easy being green.
But the curry was lovely indeed.
