Please Don’t Eat the Veggies

From Grow. Cook. Eat. Repeat. by Su Tee

April 1, 2009

I should be delighted. My teenage twit is eating his fruits and raw veggies: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, apples; carrots, celery, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers. While part of me is delighted, other parts–-the growing and buying part, the washing and prepping part, the budget management part–-are, what’s the word? Oh, yeah: annoyed. It just takes so much more time, energy and money to fill a twit full of fruit and vegetables than vacuum-packed bags of sugar and preservatives. I water, weed, soil amend, pick: he just eats. The other twits weren’t even aware that we grew cucumbers, strawberries or raspberries this past summer; teen twit got to them first. I buy and wash; again, he just eats. The quantities, they’re breathtakingly impressive: two pounds of carrots, a celery head, five red peppers, a quart of frozen blueberries-–in a sitting. (And no, he’s not trying to jump-start his colon.) Does anybody out there know how aggravating it is to open the cooler at 6 PM to retrieve two heads of romaine for the Caesar salad you were looking forward to all day, only to find a plastic bag, empty except for a drooping leaf (justification for leaving the bag in the cooler). I made him start to wash the veggies. But that’s almost worse–-he eats on the job. It’s getting expensive. Growing season hasn’t really begun, we eat organic, we live in Vancouver, BC (not a cheap city). He’s causing havoc with my food budget. Please don’t get me wrong. I like that he eats his fruits and veggies. I just never thought I would ever say to my twit, Enough with the roughage. Go eat a cookie.