Last year, before the apocalypse really ramped up, I tried out a fruit and vegetable delivery service.
I was drawn into the glamour, man.
Life sustaining healthy food, delivered right to my doorstep from a company with a wholesome, folksy name.
I felt healthier just entering my credit card information.
I got a confirmation email which included complicated instructions on how the tubs they delivered would be retrieved. It was something like Make sure you leave your tubs on the southeast corner of your house, the second Tuesday of the month unless your last name starts with an L or a W, in which case, leave your tub under your neighbor’s carport. Unless your tub is yellow. Yellow tubs are to be burned in the back yard. Please leave video proof.
Just reading the email exhausted me, but I still had high hopes for our first delivery.
I imagined a wicker basket filled with fruits and vegetables which looked like they came from the garden of Eden. Maybe, a loaf of french bread and a small bouquet of wispy little wild flowers.
What we got was fine. I mean, fruits and vegetables delivered in one of those plastic tubs with an attached lid that folds in from the sides. Like the tubs day cares keep toys in.
Like I said, the produce looked fine, but, in reality, was no different from what I could have purchased from the grocery. For a lot less money.
I had to make a decision.
What was the benefit? Should I have healthy food delivered to me and pay ten bucks more than I should because I don’t want to drag my lazy ass to the store? So, I suspended the service after the first delivery.
I still got emails from them.
- Hey, we miss you! Are you sure you are eating healthy during these trying times?
- You’re not picking up fast food two or three times a week, are you?
- Did you order pizza again last night?
- Come back and let us bring you the food your body needs. And you don’t even have to drive any where.
- You just keep being a lazy cow and we’ll bring you some grapes.
Anyway, several months passed, maybe even a year, since I had tried the service. One day a few weeks ago, I opened an email from them. I thought, maybe, I’d just look and see what they had. Maybe, the whole garden of Eden thing was an option now.
As it were, I reactivated my account.
I didn’t really want to reactivate my account, but wanted to look at vegetables and obviously my only choice was to look at this site. There aren’t vegetables anywhere else on the internet.
I realized my mistake immediately, went to their contact page, and asked them to suspend my account. I re-opened on accident, blah blah blah and thank you.
Within hours, I got an email back saying my account was suspended again.
Yesterday, the green tub arrived.
We got blueberries, tomatoes, kale, grapes and pluots.
What the fuck?
So, I contacted the place. What the hell? I cancelled. Got the email saying I cancelled.
Because it was activated, I was responsible for that one delivery.
Are you fucking kidding me?
I would totally understand if I had loaded my virtual cart up with extras and then sent them emails just counting down the days. Oh my god, only three more days and you will be here. I can’t wait! Love you! Then, the day before the delivery, call them up and say, “Yeah….I’m not feeling it anymore.” I would totally understand their insistence that I follow through with that purchase. But all I did, was accidentally activate my account because I needed to look at vegetables and then deactivated my account immediately.
I’m just happy I didn’t get a yellow tub. And that our last name doesn’t start with an L or a W because our neighbor’s don’t even have a carport.
I guess now I have to eat kale.
That I could have gotten way cheaper by driving my lazy ass to the store. Which I don’t even need to do today because we have left over pizza from last night
Image by Gabe Raggio from Pixabay
It’s the kale. There’s something weirdly evil about it. Years ago I had a job stocking the salad bar at a restaurant that shall remain nameless. Let’s just say their name starts with an S and ends with a Y-apostrophe-S. Wait, that’s too obvious. Let’s just say the middle of their name spells “honey”. Anyway we used kale for a garnish and would reuse the same kale for at least three days. Sometimes a whole week.
Also my wife and I briefly joined a local organic vegetable coop. For the price of a regular bunch of decent vegetables from the store we’d get a box of the most sorry ass vegetables you’ve ever seen, and it was always a weird mix. What the fuck could we do with one withered kohlrabi?
At least you got some pluots which are tasty. You can garnish them with kale.
Oh god..reusing the kale…that is horrifying.
I’m never eating in a restaurant again. We have a version on your “honey” restaurant, we used to have “honey’s” but mostly we have Frisch’s.
I keep considering getting my groceries delivered. Publix used to have a service that we used for the bulky and heavy stuff. But I could never bring myself to trust their choice of fresh produce or meat/fish. That I always had to do myself. Then they cancelled that program. Now it’s back in but costs a bunch and I believe their service charge is by weight, which negates the whole point of using them in the first place. But it would still be nice to have someone do my shopping for me. And putting it away. And then cooking it. Serving it and doing the dishes. Someone who isn’t me.
I would be all in on the cooking, cleaning, serving thing as well. I think they’re called cooks and maids and rich people have them
Laughing. Tried an Ingredients Delivery service and that turned out to be a disaster. It all starts piling up, at least in my house. And yes, its not always easy to break free!
Yeah, it hurts when that stuff goes to waste!
My last job, the one I had a stroke while working 13 hour night shifts at, was an organic grocery delivery place. They were called the Bay Area Organic Express when I was hired in late 2006, but a year later they were bought by a Canadian company called SPUD, which seems to still be in business.
I had already ridden three businesses into the dirt while working for them and goddamn it, I wasn’t gonna let that happen again. So I very nearly worked myself to death making sure the transition was successful.
Check your blood pressure.
I found the stuff they delivered to be good quality and I oversaw the effort that went into presenting the boxes and trying to ensure the items in them could actually be made into something one’s family could eat on a more or less normal night.
There are meal prep services now that take that concept farther than we ever did, with ingredients pre-portioned for the recipes and all of that, and I have read about people who love them, but I could never get into them.
I still have memories of the final operation before clean up each morning, where we went through each completed box and arranged everything to make sure none of it would be damaged (peaches and tomatoes on top) and looked appetizing upon first opening. It was a little like flower arranging, red chard on top, with yellow squash and apples peeking out from under on the sides.
After my stroke, they offered to send me a box each week, but I begged off as I had bigger things to take care of just then. I don’t know what their prices were like, but they were a good company, and if I was wealthy and still lived in the Bay Area I would consider ordering from them.
I remember when they first started with the plastic tubs instead of the waxy cardboard boxes, and while it’s a safer and cleaner system, the boxes just never looked as nice as the old cardboard ones did.
Kale isn’t hard to deal with if you cook it like a green, but my family is from the south and greens are a thing down there. Baby kale is good in salads, though.
I can stand kale in a salad. Even the regular kind, you just have to massage it in some olive oil to break it down a little. Keeps it from being so chewy.
I feel like kale is something they invented like 10 or 15 years ago to get us off iceberg lettuce. Wrong, I know, but still I cannot love kale. Anyhow, if one can’t shop for whatever reason (covid, debility, exhaustion) and one has the money with lowered expectations, these services can help. My fave is the Ugly Vegetable thing, because why not? 🙂
I did some of the other food delivery services and I liked them fine. I didn’t like the last one, which was a heat and eat sort of deal. The food was terrible and I like just about anything
I am a lazy cow, just saying
It’s a valid choice.
My son made kale chips with the kale. Even though I told them they would taste like satan’s butthole. He made them anyway. Ate one. Spit it out. Threw them away.
That’s hilarious! I tried some meal delivery services, you know, the ones where they send you everything you need to make a meal in under 20 minutes. I actually learned a lot about cooking simple meals, but sometimes things were missing from the boxes, and really, I was paying for the convenience of not having to go to the store and buy things (that would make way more than one meal), perfectly proportioned, etc. At the beginning of the pandemic, when our grocery stores looked like something out of the Soviet Union in the 90s, I signed up for a service I’d been eyeing, “Imperfect Foods.” The idea was to sell produce that would be turned down by grocery stores for being out of spec. (too big, weird size, small blemish, etc.) and the produce is cheaper than the stores. They started adding meats, cheeses, dairy (and non-meat choices), from sustainable farmers. Turns out their meats are really very good, and the produce and dairy kick ass. We’ve only had two snaffus and customer service was great. Now I can get everything at the store, but I like the model of keeping food out of landfills, so I’ll keep this one going.
I’ve tried a few of those and I liked them, I just couldn’t justify the cost
I’m getting fruits and vegetables every other week from Misfits and I love it! Yes, they gave me kale in one box so I made kale chips and devoured them. I couldn’t identify the jicama but with help of my Facebook friends the mystery was solved very quickly.
I thought about trying that one as well