Mutant Fruit

There is never a dull moment at my job. No matter who I am with no matter where I am I can find something to talk about with anyone. Before I continue let me just make this disclaim, I am in no way a naturalist or purist or whatever the word is for eating only organic foods. But sometimes I wonder if that isn't a good idea to look into.

So back to the talking to anyone thing. I was chatting with one of the Juvenile Court Officers that I work with today, and believe it or not we started talking about a case but it quickly deteriorated into other topics completely unrelated to work. One of them was the topic of mutant fruit, at this point I can't remember how it got started but it was a fairly entertaining conversation.

We were discussing the fact that now when you go to the grocery story some things have become almost unrecognizable. In a recent visit to the store I thought I would buy some strawberries and as I searched through the packages for one that looked "good" I noticed that some of them only had like 5 strawberries in a pound box. These strawberries were a pale shade of red, hard as a rock, and easily the size of ping pong ball. Now I don't know about the rest of you but when my mom had a strawberry patch the strawberries we got NEVER looked like that. They were, on average, the size of a large marble, were a deep shade of red, and were juicy and full of flavor.

So I just have to ask, what the hell happened? And it's not just strawberries. Bananas, apples, oranges (have you seen those lately they are larger than a softball), cucumbers, tomatos, I could go on and on. Everywhere you look in the produce department things have gotten larger, more pale, and less flavorful. When did this change occur, when did we decide that size mattered more than flavor? Produce has been sprayed with growth hormones, to get bigger, then picked early so they don't rot on the way to the store, and then sprayed again to "ripen" them up so they look pretty on the shelf. Basically what we have ended up with is some mutant form of the fruits and vegetables we once knew and loved.

I don't know if at this point we can ever go back, we have become all to accustomed to this over sized produce and probably for the most part don't even realize we are missing out on any flavor. However that being said it makes me think that next year I will be hitting the farmer's market hard. I don't care if it's a little deformed or I have to eat 10 strawberries rather than 5 to get my fill, as long as it's fresh and flavorful.

I will leave you with this closing thought. The juvenile court officer suggested this course of action the next time you are in the store. Pick up one of these mutant fruits, find one of the employess and ask them "what the hell is this?" If nothing else you may get some entertainment out of their reaction.

Concert in the Corn

This weekend I was kidnapped by a dear friend and taken to South Dakota of all places. Granted we weren't very far into South Dakota but none the less we were in South Dakota. What's in South Dakota you ask, well in the words of my friend "the largest free music event in the country" also known as Lifelight. Tens of thousands of people come together over the course of 3 packed days of Christian music performed on 6 different performance stages. The whole experience is a little overwhelming if you are a Lifelight virgin as I was. However I will say it was a really good time and the weather was beautiful.

Now as usual a lot of performers made a comment or two about the fact they were in South Dakota. Granted I am an Iowan not a South Dakotan but the comments pretty much sounded the same. You know how rural it is, how uncool we are even though we like to think we are gangsta in South Dakota etc. Now I am no longer offended by these things and in fact as we were walking around the event I decided that we kind of bring it on ourselves.

Lifelight this year was in a new location. Twelve miles south of Sioux Falls in Worthing SD. Really it wasn't even in Worthing it was east of Worthing. . .on a huge farm. . .that's right ladies and gentlemen a farm. The parking lots were what I assume used to be corn fields and corn fields surrounded the event grounds on all sides. One of the stages was in a barn, the merchandise vendors were also in barns or maybe those were machine sheds, I don't know what the technical term is for all the different buildings. There was another place filled with vendors called Lifelight alley, that was lined on one side with cilos. Cilos people cilos.

So really how can we not laugh at ourselves? We bring all kinds of musicians from big cities to the rural midwest. . .to a corn field to be exact. . .and we expect them not to make fun of us. We should really be making fun of ourselves. Anyway there are some random thoughts from my weekend at Lifelight. All in all it was a good time. There were also a lot of activities over the weekend, but I will save those for another post. Stayed tuned!