Help! I Need a Salad Shooter!

by Beverly Tjerngren

My husband likes to say that I'm afraid of fruit. That's ridiculous, I know, and of course it's not true. It's not a fear so much as a keen sense of uneasiness. Or, to use the vernacular, fresh produce just flat-out gives me the creeps.

It hasn't always been this way. I remember eating assorted fruits and vegetables with near-reckless abandon when I was a child. Even when I was in high school I had nothing against vegetable trays and fruit bowls (though my mother will tell you that I frequently complained of apples making me "feel hollow" whenever she suggested one as a snack). I think it all began when I moved out on my own.

I was 18 when I started doing my own grocery shopping, and along with the heady freedom of being able to buy Premium saltine crackers, even if the other brands were just as good and half as expensive to boot, I got a painful reality check when I learned just what a minefield the produce section could be. I had never known just how gross an overripe, starting-to-soften tomato could feel in the palm of my hand. Or the way that a mushy brown bruise marring the side of an otherwise beautiful peach could make my stomach flip-flop unpleasantly. Just thinking about the nasty shock of cutting open a firm bell pepper only to find the inside black and furry with mold makes me want to swear off vegetables forever, a problem made all the more, well, problematic, by the fact that I'm a vegetarian.

Yep, that's right. I'm a vegetarian who is grossed out by vegetables. Because I can't live on pasta and bread alone (much as that appeals to me at times), and because I really do like the taste of fresh fruits and vegetables, I can't let their creepiness get the best of me. Shopping for them, though, is a task I don't particularly relish. I feel compelled to examine every single apple and orange and head of cauliflower, selecting only the firmest, the most perfect, the utterly blemish-free to place in my shopping basket. Careful as I am, I am still blindsided occasionally by a banana that looks gorgeous on the outside but is soft and brownish on the inside. The potential for mushiness and discoloration is everywhere, sadly.

People often ask me why I'm a vegetarian, and when they find out about my produce issues they understand my choice even less. Consider the ordeal of fruit- and vegetable-shopping for me, though, and just imagine the agony of me trying to select cuts of meat!