Organic by Nature

Recently, I found myself at a natural foods market. My wife and I gave the gift of Spicy Hot Relish this year, which is surprisingly hard to find and can only be found at such places. We considered ourselves lucky to buy the last jar.

It was my first time at this particular store, and after finding the relish that had brought us in, we spent some time perusing about the store. Despite the full shelves of jars and homemade dips and soup packets, the stacked crates of fruits and vegetables, and the humming refrigerators along the back wall, the store felt oddly barren. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I felt like I was shopping in somebody’s cellar.

The store did hold some pretty cool stuff though. There were side-by-side crates for sweet potatoes and yams, which could never be mistaken for one another. I’ve been using the two terms interchangeably, but the sweet potatoes had a purple skin whereas the yams looked more familiar. (Wikipedia says the two are the same thing. What do they know?) I would have gotten a few each to test the difference had I not just bought ten pounds of “Sweet Potatos” from CostCo for $7. Maybe another time though.

In the ten minutes or so that we were looking around, there were two shoppers. A man bought a huge amount of meat. They sell local organic meat, which is noticeably more expensive, and I am pretty sure the man spent close to a hundred dollars on ground beef. That’s a lot of beef! And a woman came in to buy four gallons of local organic milk. That’s a lot of milk!

A quick note about organic beef: I have had two organic hamburgers in my life. One of them was the best hamburger I have ever eaten and the other is the best hamburger I have ever cooked. It is expensive, but it is well worth it.

The milk lady though sparked my imagination. She came in with four empty glass bottles in a convenient carrying case, handed the bottles to the cashier and went to fill up her carrying case with four more glass bottles full of milk. Only after she left, did I go check it out. The milk is not only organic but has a hand-written note saying which local farm produces it. I’m half surprised it didn’t mention the individual cow’s name… now that would be something.

I can just imagine… “No, I had the Suzy milk last week. It was good but I think I’ll go with Bessie this week.” That would be farm-fresh. Next, they could bring the actually cows to the store to promote their milk over their competitors. “Moo,” Suzy would say enticingly as I would be clearly impressed with Bessie bow.

(Did I take that too far? That’s what happens when I try to post regularly.)

My wife and I buy organic milk, so this local organic milk in glass bottles interests me. I even like the idea of the two dollar deposit attached to the glass bottles.  It just adds to the organic-ness of it all.  A while back, I was at a supermarket buying milk among other stuff.  I was looking through the expiration dates on the milk cartons, when a boy maybe 8-years old ran up beside me and grabbed a carton of organic milk.  The father, a big man with scruffy beard, grabbed the carton of milk from his son's hands and simply said "no."  He put it back and then explained that there is milk that doesn't cost so much.

Perhaps I silently judged him at first, but the part of the story that I keep thinking about is that I soon found myself asking why I buy the expensive milk.  The answer, it turns out, isn't so much in my disgust of animal cruelty or distrust additives and preservatives but lies in how much milk I've thrown out in my life.  Organic milk lasts for like two months without going bad.  It's the closest thing to a miracle of modern milk that I've discovered since strawberry powder. 

For me, milk is more of an ingredient than a beverage, so it needs a pretty long shelf life.  Quality ingredients are important to any dish, and for quality ingredients, I choose my local natural foods market. 

And for quality endings to meaningless posts...