This is about unwashable kale, the bane of my existence.
It is also about having your aesthetics/ethics shaped in some formative period by the 2010ish locavore food movement, as if Alice Waters* and Mark Bittman and the ‘heritage’ section of a Banana Republic from 2009-12 are all conspiring against me, preventing normalcy.
In my hometown of New York City, there are Greenmarkets, which sell the superior produce, unlike the supermarkets which sell literal garbage (yes even the fancy ones). In Toronto, everything’s more tilted towards the middle, less income inequality and whatnot, so you can get pretty good fruits and vegetables at fruit stands and pretty good ones at the farmer’s market. It’s often from Ontario, whatever that means, Ontario is enormous, but the point is, if local’s your thing, I’m not sure it much matters.
There are nevertheless a couple especially good stands at the market that at least seem to have a better selection, plus I am compelled by forces beyond my control to visit the place, despite the self-loathing in me this decision has been known to set forth on a weekly basis from June to November or whatever it is.
The problem with the farmers market as a shopping experience is not that the items cost any more than they do at notoriously inflated Canadian supermarket chains. It’s that they have gone all-in on anti-produce-bag. Heaven forbid the place that sells the fruits and vegetables also provide means of getting these home unscathed. The quaint music is fine, the banter, the lines, I can live with. It’s the getting home and realizing you just spent the time and money on a cornucopia that is now crushed.
At one stand, there is a discussion of whether you want to keep the carton some peaches or apples or whatever came in. The correct answer is that you don’t, because the place wants to reuse it, as I learned when I once did want the container (seemed easier to get stuff home in) and was asked to bring it back the next week if I remembered and was thinking this seemed like more responsibility I wanted to take on for what would by that point be a bit of cardboard with fruit pieces rotted to it. So now I say no, and do get plastic bags from that stand.
This is also the stand where they have a sign up that prefer that you use cash but do have a machine for cards and you have to weigh how much cash you have against the fact that some other stands only take cash. Real letter-to-The-Ethicist stuff there.
Another stand likes to use brown paper bags, so you get home with a bunch of things that look interchangeable and have to remember which is which, leading one to wonder if they might one day invent a clear, thin, easy-to-use plastic bag for this function. I guarantee the brown-bag storage method increases food waste, because I just rediscovered two eggplants in the fridge that were most certainly not from this week’s market but do seem salvageable, but only just. They do also have produce bags but ration them or something behind the table, which meant that I got home with broccoli, scallion, and basil sharing a bag, which is not something anyone would think to do with these three items in a supermarket. But this is the stand with the best stuff so I will buy it even if they start hurling it at the customers.
Another stand sells this lush, wonderful kale, in enormous bunches too big for any bag, not that bags are something they would provide. Or rather the lettuce comes in ziploc bags, but the kale simply cannot be contained. You have to bring your own luggage for it, or a large Baggu-type situation, and squeeze it in your fridge like that, which means it goes from fresh-picked crispness to wilted within moments. Yes you leave the market with the visually requisite burst of green vegetable poking out of your tote bag, so voluminous it cannot be contained, but then what?
And because this kale is organic (presumably; I never thought to check), you may find yourself on a weeknight washing kale in the manner of a woman who says ‘I have to stay home and wash my hair’ and means it. Do you understand the number of aphid-type bugs I removed from kale a recent evening? All I can say with confidence here is that despite washing this kale enough times to cause a drought in Ontario, I am quite sure I served a non-zero number of these bugs in the kale salad.
The terrible thing is that once you’ve bought the nice produce, you have to cook. Ideally it covers multiple meals across the week, but stuff goes off, you can’t find it because it’s throughout the fridge in some mix of reusable tote bags and the brown paper bags.
I have come to the conclusion that while I love-hate buying the vegetables and am more than happy to eat them, it’s the figuring out what to make with them bit that throwing me off. Alice Waters is welcome to come by and figure this out.
*There’s an epic NYT video where Waters’s (adult) daughter explains that her food-genius mother taught her how to slice cherry tomatoes, and it is literally just the way everyone slices cherry tomatoes.
Hi Phoebe! A good way to store kale is in a vase of water, like cut flowers. Ideally in the fridge, but not necessarily. I really enjoy your stopping posts! 😍
I watched that NYT video of Fanny Singer, and she keeps touching the raw tuna with her bare hands, and they are outside, and where is she washing her hands? I'm not taking her advice on slicing vegetables until I know the handwashing situation.