Food Found at My Doorstep

Everyone likes food. It tastes good, it makes us feel good, and it can be very satisfying. Everyone also likes to eat healthy, or at least, they think about eating healthy. Unfortunately, not all of us have time to head out to the farmers' market, or can take the time at the grocery store to pick out that perfect piece of fruit. That's why places like Planet Organics exist. Planet Organics is a website service that delivers fresh, organic, healthy and delicious food right to your door. And sometimes that healthy, organic, green food winds up on your neighbor's door step. Stay with me here.

At one point, my family realized that we weren't eating enough greens, and that fruits and vegetables were seriously missing from our diet. My wife went online, did some research, and found Planet Organics. We signed up. We ordered food. We got the food. And we ate the food, at least, for the first few deliveries. Then we kind of trailed off from eating so many fruits and vegetables; and you can only eat salad so many days of the week. We started noticing that this expensive, fresh, organic, healthy food was rotting on our counter and in the refrigerator. We stopped ordering from Planet Organics. We had the right intentions and Planet Organics provided the proper means; it's just that when reality stared us in the face, we prefer tater tots over beets. I mean, come on, who doesn't?

That's why I was surprised a few weeks later when I opened the front door to find a crate from Planet Organics. My first reaction was to ask my wife, "Hon, didn't you cancel the Planet Organics order?" She of course said she had. So I had to press and say, "Then why is there a crate of green, leafy stuff on our front doorstep?" At this point, she had to come see for herself what her crazy husband was talking about.

After further inspection, we found a note inside the crate. It turns out that our neighbors were going away for a week and they forgot to postpone their order. They didn't want the food to go to waste, so they left it on our doorstep. How thoughtful. How considerate. We quickly threw the crate on our kitchen counter and headed off to work.

When we returned home we took a look at what our generous and thoughtful neighbors left us. Believe me, I had no idea what some of this green, leafy, purply, grassy stuff was. My wife claimed it was lettuce. How many different types of lettuce could there be? I can name a few: romaine, iceberg and, um, Caesar? Does Caesar count as a lettuce? Probably not. OK, so I'm not that educated on lettuce, and you know what, I don't really care to be. Unless it's got blue cheese dressing poured all over it with buttery, garlicky, croutons, it's not my kind of salad.

Needless to say, the kind, generous, thoughtful gift from our neighbors spent about five days in our refrigerator until it started to turn brown. We learned a few lessons from this that we'd love to share.

First, we do need to keep eating healthy, organically — and best of all — locally. But second, we don't need to do it in such large abundance. Perhaps a once-a-week delivery was too much and we simply needed to scale down to twice a month. Was it Buddha who said "all things in moderation" (including moderation)? Third, and this goes back to what we all learned in elementary school, is to take what you want, but eat what you take. If you order five different types of lettuce, then eat the five different types of lettuce, otherwise all you're doing is throwing perfectly good food away; and that defeats the entire purpose of, well, everything.

Cheers, and bon appetit my friends!