Too Many Choices
I love Whole Foods. This should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me. The place sells the best produce and meat around. I’ve been making a concerted effort to eat in lately, so I end up going there a couple times a week. I’ve yet to buy anything I didn’t like, unless you count the plantain I had this morning, which was only bad because it was green as a lime. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to wait for it to yellow like a normal banana and it was as hard as a carrot.
So that store is one of my favorite things about living in California, but sometimes I think they have a tendency to go overboard. I needed some vanilla yesterday, and when I got to the aisle they must have had 15 different jars of the stuff. One brand sold five varieties of organic vanilla from five different countries. That’s just too much.
How am I supposed to know which country’s vanilla is the best? Is there a vanilla sommelier somewhere? Maybe a Vanilla Spectator magazine? I can just see a guy swirling one drop of it around a thimble. “The ’04 Tahitians are drinking fine already, but the Mexicans still need another year in the bottle.” And how do you describe the flavor? “It has hints of milkshake and French toast.”
I’m no chef or anything, but I’m going to contend that nobody in the entire world knows the difference between Indonesian and Indian vanilla. No human being could pass that blind taste test. It’s not possible. Out of sheer confusion I ended up with the former and it tasted, well, like vanilla. But I mostly just walked away wishing they’d have one, or maybe two brands like every other grocery store in the entire world because then I wouldn’t be eating my French toast and wondering if it would be better had I just splurged on the Guatemalan bean juice instead.
