Whose side are you on?

Fruit. Versus veggies. That is what I want to discuss now, at 3:31am. Well honestly I'd like to be sleeping, but since my body is saying "no thank you" to that suggestion, my second choice would be to discuss fruits vs. vegetables. Of course it would be more lively if I had someone else who is currently conscious to have my discourse with!

Brain sleep waves? Melatonin? REM sleep factory? Nope? Nothin'? Okay fine, I'll continue with the post, aka the one-sided discussion.

So I was eating my dinner on my lunch break tonight at work, and spent just about the entire time that I was eating thinking about that which I was eating. I had gone to the salad bar at the grocery store and purchased watermelon, honeydew, canteloupe, pineapple, and grapes (red). This is rare. In fact I can't remember the last time I have done something similar. Perhaps never. Hmm. But here's the kicker. When I started my shift today, I premeditated the purchasing of this fruit.

And this is weird because I don't particularly like fruit.

I love vegetables. I don't bother to prepare or purchase them very often, but if you put tomatoes (I know, I know, technically a fruit), corn, lima beans, peas in front of me, I will eat them with little hesitation and great satisfaction. Not only because they taste good but because they're not a burden. I had a colleague once who I did not usually see eye to eye with, but one day she said she didn't like eating fruit because it's sticky, and I thought, "Now maybe we do have something in common." And this is the type of person that I am: I actually felt closer to her and gained some respect for her at that moment. Nevermind that she was a successful businesswoman, devoted parent. No no, for Bailey, if you find eating an apple to be irritating, then you have gained some points in my book.

This conversation happened a few years ago, so I had already thoroughly thought this point through when I sat down for tonight's fruit meeting. But it was at tonight's particular meeting that I discovered another point against fruit. Pro corn. I want to say Pro Legume, because that sounds French and also like a great name for a band, but I think legumes are beans/nuts? Moving on.

Fruit is sensitive. It goes from underripe to overripe in moments; it seems to slip from one state to the next so quickly that the beautiful state of ripeness is unavailable and thus, aggravating. Kind of like an oh-so-handsome Hollywood star. Forever untouchable, we know this, yet we keep forking over $10 to watch him or her make out with some other untouchable in his or her new film. Stupid. So why do we keep chasing these people and these coy items with seeds?

I am not kidding you when I say that I have made a vow not to eat or purchase an apple until I genuinely crave one again. Because I really don't like apples. I chased them for years, always buying them because I felt that's what I should do. And then I would place them in the fruit basket, wait for them to rot, and then throw them away on my way to the grocery store.

Within my collage of fruit this evening, I would say the pineapple was perfect, the watermelon was almost there (though deceiving, because it definitely appeared to be a darker red but tasted more like a medium red), the canteloupe was "meh," the honeydew obviously not ripe because when is it ever?, and the grapes...the grapes. Grapes are one of the most aggravating fruits for me (bananas, for the record, are the most tolerable). They are either so sour, or mushy. Both of these states are so miserable for the mouth in which they enter, why oh WHY do we keep torturing ourselves? And they sell so many!!!! Why are there 200 grapes in a bag? Seriously we only need 15, max. Ugh, I could go on until dawn about all this. Tonight's grapes were sour.

So point one: fruit is sticky. Vegetables, while maybe requiring a spoon, do not ooze juice all over the consumer.

And two: Vegetables don't mess around in letting you know that they're ripe. "Holla," they say. "We're in pretty good shape today, and we'll still be this way on Thursday, so no rush." Fruit, on the other hand, says, "Betcha can't guess if I'm ripe! I've got this thick skin/rind that doesn't let you know for sure. Go ahead, purchase me. Then you'll slice into me and be disappointed, because it's either too early or too late and there's no turning back."

I have officially joined the Pro Legume Party. Now if the fruits want to come around and start behaving more like adults, then I will consider negotiations. But until then I'm planning on serving my children veggies. Not because my children will behave badly and need to learn to eat their veggies, but because the fruit has behaved, and continues to behave badly, setting an inappropriate example for my offspring.