Vegetable Pedophilia

This is a public service announcement to inform you that someone in your neighborhood may be a vegetable pedophile. It is quite possible that this person lives in San Francisco's Mission district and goes to the Ferry Building on Saturdays and looks for the tiniest, cutest, babiest vegetables she or he can find--at whatever cost. I know two such people. One lives with me, sometimes blogs with me, and the other is her cartoon Pixar manguy. I came home from my own Noe Valley farmers' market excursion this morning with a bag full of mature, hearty dark leafy greens and large Tokyo turnips to find these teeny-tiny baby baby radishes wedged together in a ziplock bag sitting on our kitchen island. Note the binder clip for relative scale.

I went, "EEP!" and immediately grilled Erin on where she got these infants and how much they cost. Marin Roots Farm stand at 20 cents per tiny radish, for a bag of 50 (who counted them?!). Marin Roots does have amazing produce but I'm always too cheap to get it and afraid of my own tendencies toward fetishizing cute things, especially food. Unable to resist their miniature charm, I swooped this ten-sack of tiny radishes away to my room for playtime with my set of Russian bubushka dolls. I also ran back to the kitchen to scoop up these cute baby baby shallots that Erin got from Diry Girl Produce to complete my obsessive compulsive laying out of cute things in little rows on top of my dainty handkerchief collection (see the tiniest tiniest babushka? that's smaller than the very tip of my fingernail).

I finally ate one of the little radishes and it was very crisp and deliciously earthy, but I devoured it so quickly and my belly was still hungry afterward. I felt like a violent ogre. After this frenzy passed, and I packed the tiny baby radishes back into their ziplock veggie outfacing babybjorn, I was left wondering whether the veggie pedophiles of this world get more pleasure from the overwhelming cuteness of these tiny, tender things or whether they thrive off the vertiginous feeling of being a powerful giant themselves in comparison to these wee helpless forms. I look into my own soul and continue to seek an answer in the abyss.