Buying in bulk is your love language, Virgo. Your childhood was spent tromping around the smooth cement floors of Costco, a wonderland filled with as many family size containers of pub mix a girl could want. A land of samples. A land of hope. You grew up enthusiastically stocking up for winter (but not for winter, just for whenever).
Conversely, your husband grew up in a giant city. He grew up walking to grocery stores and walking out of them with his arms comfortably carrying a light grocery bag. He lives in a world where it isn’t a family tragedy if you forgot an ingredient at the store. If you need something you just go out, it’s all just right there, Christmas isn’t ruined, etc.
You each bring your respective upbringings into your household. His upbringing is well suited for your lifestyle, whereas yours (grocery shopping as though you have a minivan to put all of your grocery bags into that you will drive to your home that has a “Garage Fridge”) is a little less conducive to smooth sailing in your small, Brooklyn kitchen.
You each try to compromise your values a little. His value, in this case, is simply To Have Reason, and yours Virgo, is To Relentlessly Prepare For A Fourteen Day Power Outage That May Never Come.
Guided by the glamorous spirit of compromise, you’ll pretend to be blasé when you notice there are fewer pounds of “backup rice” than your prepper instincts are comfortable with, and he’ll try to join your gross spirit of abundance by simply buying more than like, two apples each time he goes to the grocery store.
It is perhaps due to such compromise, that The Blueberry Decision was made.
You both think berry containers use way too much plastic. So you decide to begin a new chapter of your shared life. A chapter in which you buy your berries in bulk, from a local farm (to lower the carbon footprint of these wasteful, wasteful berries). After some research, you both determine the only ethical way to buy blueberries is to purchase 30 pounds at a time from a farm in Pennsylvania. The skies did some digging on this Virgo, and there were (and still are!) many, many better ways to buy blueberries.
Your husband grew up with the metric system, Virgo, so it’s likely that the first blueberry purchase was less so an attempt to appease your doomsday instincts, and more-so an egregious failure of the conversion app you both cherish.
Every 3 months, your 30 pounds of blueberries arrive. At first you feel like geniuses. Joyously patting yourselves on the backs for being environmental heroes. Storing 30 pounds of blueberries isn’t easy, but you manage. Filling every bowl, pitcher, and Tupperware in the house, you manage to fit these berries into your 3/4 the normal size refrigerator and freezer.*
With each 3 month period that came to pass, it became harder and harder to categorize The Blueberry Decision as a success. In order to arrive intact, these blueberries are transported with innumerable ice packs, blizzards of styrofoam, and oceans of plastic bubble wrap. You tell yourselves that, Sure, it’s more plastic than you were expecting (Virgo, it’s truly a ton of plastic) but it’s still probably less plastic than what you’d use buying blueberries at the grocery store.
You stay the course, and continue to order your heroic, quarterly, 30 pound box of blueberries.
While you were away on a long weekend, your apartment lost power. All the blueberries thawed, leaked juice everywhere, and without their juice, became sad, cold, little raisins. 30 pounds of sad, cold, little raisins, no less. You dealt with this setback. You trained yourself to taste a regular blueberry when you were instead eating a little abomination, and you counted down the days until the next blueberry delivery.
The next 30 pound box of blueberries reads “grown in Chile” on the side. Nothing against Chile, but you were under the impression you were lionhearted environmentalists, buying from a small, nearby farm in order to avoid the pollution that comes from transporting food from one place to another.
This is when you’ll realize that the farm you buy your blueberries from is NOT a farm, and is instead a distribution company for restaurants. There’s nothing local about these guys, nothing inherently wholesome or Green like you had so fantasized.
Your imagined flower crown is singed, your environmental hubris destroyed. What blueberries cause no harm, Virgo? Which blueberries can you feel good about consuming, without your trusty tool of self delusion? It’s back to the blueberry drawing board for you, Virgo, no answers in sight.