I was at an Everett grocery store last night picking up some vegetables that aren’t ready yet in my garden: tomatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, Swiss chard and beets. The grocery clerk had a hard time ringing up some items in my cart.
Can you guess which ones?
She peered through a plastic bag of red globes.
“Beets,” I said.
Maybe she’d never seen them out of a can.
Next she rang up the Swiss chard as rhubarb. Granted, the red kind of chard does sort of look like rhubarb.
“That’s not rhubarb,” I said. “It’s Swiss chard.”
She turned to the checker at the next stand and asked him where to find it on the produce code list. He knew.
I’m not poking fun at grocery clerks. Most could identify a rutabaga from a parsnip in a millisecond.
That grocery clerk probably didn’t know because, like most Americans, she doesn’t eat the stuff. She thinks her kids won’t eat it. And most of the people buying groceries aren’t buying it either. Most people eat iceberg lettuce, carrots, onions, white potatoes and canned green beans.
That’s too bad because most “off-the-beaten path” veggies pack a nutritional wallop and taste great — if you know how to cook them. They taste even better if you grow them yourself or get them fresh from a local farm in a market basket. Info on market baskets: http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/07/03/27/100liv_d1csa001.cfm
I wanted to share a Web site with you. It’s written by a woman who wanted to incorporate more veggies in her diet so she pledged to cook a new vegetable a new way daily. She’s been doing it now for a couple of years and has a Web site with searchable recipes: http://kitchen-parade-veggieventure.blogspot.com/
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