a sign of the times

Thursday is my organic fruit and veg coop pick up day. I love Thursdays :) and so do the kids, cos we get a couple of big boxes of goodies to unpack.

Two things have happened in the past week that struck me as a sad sign of the times... in relation to food.

Julian told me he wanted an apple. I told him to help himself and he came back saying he didn't want one of the ones in the bowl, cos they were old and yucky.

We'd only got them a couple of days before and the apples were so fresh and crunchy, so i told him so.

He insisted that no, they were old, and that he'd show me how he knew they weren't nice ones... so he brought me one of the organic pink lady apples and showed me a tiny blemish on the skin and a spot where the apple wasn't perfectly round and symmetrical.

Dear oh dear. I didn't even know what to say because i recognised that he has already made a measure of what an apple should look like, based on what i have been buying from supermarkets for the past 4yrs. Shiny, perfectly round, unblemished and suitable for a 'letters of the alphabet photo' type apples. Unfortunately this has become his standard for what a normal good fresh apple should look like.

I was further saddened when this morning he came to me in absolute delight at finding a leaf on the stem of the apple. He simply could not believe it...

Food is so far removed from the source - the tree, the farm, the person who picks it, that our children aren't aware of what a single piece of fruit represents in terms of how it has arrived in the fruit basket, and I've got to say i haven't thought about it a whole lot till the past year myself.

So I'm in the process of reprogramming the kids and their standards for what good food should look like... at the same time I'm reminding myself.