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Health & Fitness

The Watermelon

Seedless watermelon, the only kind offered at Target, just feels wrong to me. As does buying produce at the same place I buy my bathroom towels.

Hey there –

I bought a watermelon from Target the other day.

And it was good. 

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Now, I am usually a "buy your watermelon on the side of the street with the big black seeds that you can spit" kind of a gal. Seedless watermelon, the only kind offered at Target, just feels wrong to me. As does buying produce at the same place I buy my bathroom towels.

I don’t know why.

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It’s not as if I have never bought food from Target before, but it has always been the kind of food that comes from a bag or box and makes your hands all kinds of weird colors while you eat it. You know, the kind with zero nutritional value and lots of preservatives.

Yummmmmmmy!

I am mostly a farmer’s market, family farm and roadside market, grow it your self, or buy it at Outpost kind of a produce shopper. I prefer that the produce not come from a truck that drove across the country. That being said, I am having a hard time giving up mangos and kiwis, and last time I checked these items are not grown in the USA.

Why the watermelon at Target then, you ask? It could have had something to do with my recent freak-out about my neighbor’s grocery bill, which is less than half of ours. I don’t care that they have three fewer children than we do, all I could think about when I heard their budget number was that we could go on another family vacation each year if we could get ours down to that number. But this Target produce purchase probably had more to do with the fact that my parents were expected to arrive from Colorado in two hours and I still needed to wash the floors and clean behind the refrigerator and stove.

The boys and I were at Target to return an item, we needed food, and Target now has food, produce even. So I bought a watermelon. I also bought cherries that my younger son absolutely could not leave the store without us purchasing. I also bought chips in bags with lots of preservatives... yummy! But we did not purchase the soda that we thought was free with the chips and turned out to be a bit of a bait and switch on us.

You just never know when an economics lesson is going to pop up.

Fast forward to dinner preparation later that night. My mom is sitting on the bench in our kitchen chatting with me and admiring our fabulously clean floors I am sure while I putzed with the food. I slowly began to slice open the watermelon with a large knife. When the pink flesh appeared I must have uttered a sound of surprise.

“What is it?” My mom asked me, concern knitted on her face.

“Nothing, I just bought the watermelon at Target,” I answered apologetically, as if I had just exposed the entire family to strep throat. I am not sure what I expected to come out of the middle of that watermelon, maybe something plastic and mass-produced?

A few days later I had to buy another watermelon for dinner. (Did I mention our grocery budget issue?) I bought this one at the Outpost and even though it was seedless I felt so much better buying it than the one I bought at Target. I don’t even know where the one from Target came from but I felt certain it was shipped from further away than the one from the Outpost. Maybe the Target watermelon didn’t even grow in a field at all.

The Outpost watermelon had pink flesh too, but it was not so good – in fact it is still in our fridge because no one wants to eat it.

“That is just wrong,” my 17-year-old stepdaughter said when she heard my watermelon tale of woe. “Target should not have better produce than the Outpost. Produce at Target is just wrong somehow.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” I told her, happy that she agreed with my way of thinking, irrational as it may be. ”Did you eat any of the cherries the other night?”

 “Yeah, they were GOOD! Outpost?”

“Target,” I whispered. I felt strangely like crying.

Thanks for checking in,

– Irene

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