Sweetpea Bicycles

It’s easy to get veggie blindness in a town like this.  Whole Foods is piled high with every kind of apple, kumquat, and matsutaki you could ever hope to need and the year round farmers markets stock leafy greens hearty enough to thatch a roof.  And with The Economist calling vegetarianism the new Prius of the ecologically inclined, I suppose we Portlanders are just going to have to come to terms with the difference between the sweet potato and the yam, the cilantro and the flat leaf parsley.  But after a while, the bounty is enough to make your eyes glaze over.  

That’s why I was so excited to see a cardboard box on the porch when I came home yesterday – my first delivery from Organics to You produce delivery.  The “Bin for One” included a remarkable volume and variety of produce: pears, apples, bananas, blood oranges, a grapefruit, avocado, onion, spinach, lettuce, mushrooms, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and yams.  This was bounty on a small and personal scale and each item packed up for me in that box looked more like a gift than if I had endless choice.  I didn’t squeeze thirty avocados to find just the perfect one.  I didn’t decide between 18 varieties of apple.  I didn’t shy away from the challenge of a plus-sized head of cauliflower.

I will meet my bag of carrots with courage and new soup recipes.  I will take bike light batteries out of my crisper to make room for leaf lettuce.  I will find myself humming “Amazing Grace” in the kitchen. I was veggie blind, but now I see.