Anti-Climacus

Megan McArdle talked last week about what constitutes innovation in the kitchen. Towards the end of her post, she mentions the benefits of frozen vegetables:

Then there is the food. I simply don't believe that either Tyler or Paul Krugman have ever, as adults, cooked the way that a 1954 cook did in the most meaningful sense. I don't believe that they have gone without fresh produce for six to eight months at a time, as my mother did in her childhood--and was told to be grateful for the frozen vegetables which hadn't been available when her mother was young. And this was not some urban food desert; my mother grew up in a farm town where the produce, during the summer and early autumn months, is some of the best I've ever had.

I was an incorrigible youth when I lived in Michigan, and ate vegetables in the most limited capacities I could. When I moved to North Carolina, and began to eat more vegetables, I noticed that the prices of some of them would rise over the winter, which led me to assume they were out of season. With a few exceptions, though, it was remarkably easy to find decent-to-good fresh vegetables.

Here in New Jersey, I have found fresh vegetables functionally impossible to come by. This has been a subject of conversation with the other postdocs, so I know it's not just my incompetence (it may still be our collective incompetence, but that's another problem entirely). My local grocery store regularly displays produce that is rotten or molding. They don't even attempt to hide it: it's front and center, amongst a pile of unappetizing food. Supermarkets elsewhere eliminate the truly offensive foodstuffs, but retain the mediocrity of the whole. Whole Foods prices are (normal whole foods + central new jersey surcharge + princeton surcharge), and so truly outrageous for a minuscule bump in quality.

Now, as a child I was subjected to a number of mealtime traumas relating to frozen vegetables, usually in the form of the instruction that I consume them because they were good for me. I put my parents through a number of difficult evenings, but, as a fringe benefit, honed the strength of will that no doubt got me through grad school. So you can imagine my chagrin now that I am eating large amounts of frozen vegetables (because they're good for me!). They are in all ways inferior to fresh vegetables, but better than nothing at all. My parents should consider this a formal admission that they really did know better than I did on this one.