Food Placement

Shiitake mushrooms are a plague that should have been eradicated long ago. Here I am, surrounded by heaps of glorious fungi of enormous variety, but I know that I have to buy shiitake because that’s what people want to see on the menu. Some big-shot must have run a superb marketing campaign at some point, I’m sure of it. I bought my plastic bag full of the mediocre abominations and moved on to the next stall at the market.

Potatoes are next. I do have to admit that the recent surge in sweet potatoes (not yams!) arriving on menus is a welcome change to the long reign of russets. Sweet potatoes reward good cooking much better than most potatoes. They also impart your dishes with color, which is more important than most foodies realize. Much of your body’s response to food is due to anticipation: you start to salivate, your brain starts thinking about food, and thus you are better prepared to enjoy a meal that looks more appealing. Color is a deep-seated perception that rivals taste and smell in its power to motivate.

Finally, I make it to the meat sellers’ building. The stalls inside are full of every shade of red, pink, and even some blue-grey seafood. I peruse and purchase. Both hands are full now, weighed down by bags of produce and soon-to-be soup ingredients. What I need is a smoke break. I duck outside, set my bags down and light up. The smoke is fascinating to watch in the breeze.

The timing was perfect. I stubbed the cigarette against the wall, dropping it into a bucket of dead ends. I bent down to pick the bags up, and, as I do, someone came whizzing around the corner on a forklift. There was no way they could have seen me, bent over behind all those crates, but they should have either looked harder or gone slower. I stood up into a face-full of pallets, traveling at a certainly-not-legal 15mph. I spun and crumpled into a mess of limbs and food bags, shiitake mushrooms spilling out across the cement.