Last weekend, for Kid’s birthday we took him to the local strawberry festival. Think county fair plus strawberries. A good time was had by all.

But……

Kid wanted strawberry cheesecake as his b-day cake. Auntie promised to make it and what better place to get awesome rad strawberries than a strawberry festival. Now I have shopped at a bunch of farmer’s markets, etc. Never have I been given the stink eye for being picky about what I am buying, till the Strawberry festival. After confirming that my aunt did in fact want an entire flat of strawberries (12 pints people) I went about looking through the flats for the nicest one. And I didn’t like any that I saw. When the booth lady finally came up to me I said “I want a flat, but I want pretty ones”. She pulled the top flat off, looked at the (moldy) one underneath it and proceeded to pack up the one I didn’t want. While Wonder was paying her, another booth lady came over and replaced my now purchased ugly flat with a flat of gorgeous, perfect strawberries.

“Uhm excuse me, I don’t mean to be a pain, but can i have these instead?”

Booth lady (with obvious annoyance) “They’re all the same berries!”

Me: “True, but these are prettier and I’m a food snob”.

I got my pretty berries peeps, and Auntie informs me that my pickiness paid off. Only one strawberry out of 12 pints had to be tossed.

It’s odd to me, having bartered in open markets and pantomimed to french grocer’s to get pretty carrots and onions, and having lived for a long time in a city with one of the best farmer’s markets in the country, to have been to a festival all about pretty strawberries and to have been harumphed for wanting pretty strawberries. Lemme tell you folks, the French have nothing on the unpleasantness of rural southerners.