greens and things

So yesterday I came to a conclusion. Whether or not anything will come of this conclusion remains to be seen. First let's back up. The other night I was cooking some of the turnip greens and spinach that came in my most recent CSA basket. I turned away from the stove and got ready to wipe up the counter top and do a few of the dishes in the sink when I saw one tiny (tiny tiny) baby slug crawling across the counter in the direction of the compost bowl. {She was obviously a wise and intrepid slug who knew what she wanted and where she was going...} I looked around for more. Nope. Just one baby slug crawling across the counter. So I scooped her up and took her outside to the lemon balm on the back patio.

When I came back inside I looked around again for more slugs. Usually there are more, right? This was my thought when I looked over at the greens cooking on the stove top. Thoughts of cooking baby slugs in my greens made me recoil and I thought ack ack ack and blech over and over in my head. Felt the words {and the slugs} in my mouth. Ugh. I am not cut out for eating baby slugs. It's not good for me or the baby slugs. {Yes, yes. I know, I know. But still.}

I looked around in the greens. Scooped them back and forth. Examined them very very closely. So far, no slugs. Nothing even resembling a slug. Sigh. Relief. I ate my greens with macaroni and cheese. No slugs. I checked the greens in the morning. No slugs. I looked very very closely {again}. No slugs. I ate my greens on toast with melted cheese. No slugs. And thank goodness those greens were gone now. No more slugs-on-greens to bother about. I could move on to eating other greens. Different greens. Greens that weren't in question.

So last night I was making one of my very favorite things to eat these days- spicy greens (or any greens, but spicy is much appreciated) with these spicy sesame noodles New Seasons makes. I make my own as well but New Seasons has this chili infused oil that can make theirs extra special. (Eva is sick and I went to New Seasons yesterday for sick-snacks and picked up some noodles for me.)

I chopped up the greens, added in some spinach, tossed all the greens with the noodles. Looked around for extra garlic. Took a bite. Then another. I got a container out and started dumping the extra greens in it for later. More greens! Did I take another bite of the noodles and greens? Maybe. Or maybe I saw the cut-in-half carcass of the rollie pollie bug first. And that stopped me in my tracks. I looked closely and saw a little leg on the knife. A little bit of the head next to the carcass. The main part of the carcass. I looked at the bowl of greens and noodles. I looked at the rest of the greens I was scraping into the storage container. Good grief. It was worse than eating cooked baby slugs. It was eating raw rollie pollie bug. Oh. My. Gawd.

So I looked through the extra greens. I looked through the bowl of noodles. I even dumped them out on the cutting board and scraped through them. No sigh of a little leg. No sigh of an antenna. Egads. No other part of the body. Had I already eaten it? In one of those first couple of bites? Those first couple of blissfully ignorant bites? Possibly. I will never know. I talked myself into eating a few more bites of the noodles and greens but it was no good. It never took. I finally just dumped the rest out. After the slug event the night before and now this with the chopped up rollie pollie bug, I decided to have some smoothie and call it a night. I'd definitely lost my appetite.

So here's my conclusion. I know that people all over the world eat bugs. By choice. That's what we're told, isn't it? That our food system is so messed up that we eat chemicals and all manner of artificial goo but are grossed out to eat a really very natural form of {let's face it} protein. I mean, a rollie pollie bug is even a crustacean. People definitely eat crustaceans. Shrimp. Crabs. I mean, I don't. I'm allergic to shrimp. But other people do. I know that for a fact. So it's obviously completely cultural what we decide is edible and what isn't. I'm hip to that fact for sure.

But I am not one of those people who is chomping at the bit to eat bugs. Not insects nor arachnids nor even crustaceans. And of course I know that bugs are a part of the garden. I go out of my way to share the garden with any number of bugs every day. And I know that I eat all kinds of really tiny bugs all the time. It's the bigger ones, the ones who leave foot prints, that are bothering me (as illogical as it all seems. I know that too.). So what I decided was that if I am going to be so ridiculously civilized and uptight about bug eating, I am going to have to get a little bit more uptight about how thoroughly I wash my greens. It's not doing me or the greens or the bugs any good to keep half eating them and them turning away from the kitchen entirely.

So that's it. That's my conclusion. It's simple, really. Either make peace with the bug eating once and for all or wash the heck out of those greens. (And then I'm going to lay them out on a towel and give the bugs a chance to crawl away just like we used to do with berries when I was a kid...) But here's the caveat. If I choose to wash the heck out of the greens, I have to let it go after that. I have to actually let myself eat and enjoy the greens. Trust in the washing. Trust that the bugs are gone. And be done with it. Where, after all, is the peace in washing the heck out of the greens and then never getting around to enjoying them? I guess either way I look at it, there is some peace to be made around eating the bugs. My hope is that the cleaner the greens, the easier that will be. We shall see. I'm not sure I'm up for trying out my new system right now. Maybe by lunchtime. For breakfast, though, there will be eggs without greens this morning...