What do we really want from our food?

It was a wet, windy, drizzly day yesterday, and Mr G and I were feeling somewhat lazy. In a rare event, we had a nice long sleep-in, a prolonged brunch, and sometime in the mid-afternoon wandered down to our local pub for a friendly pint. It's such a wonderful luxury to have an excellent pub at the end of your street. We don't avail ourselves of it anywhere near as much as we fell we ought but we enjoy going and want to patronise it so it keeps going. This pub has an endlessly changing list of two guest ales. The one we chose was hoppy, crisp and refreshing.

While we were enjoying our pints, a man came around offering everyone a lovely, steaming hot roast potato - it was Sunday afternoon, after all! The potatoes were delicious - crispy and golden on the outside and fluffy on the inside - and went really well with the ale, but something troubled me about them. Then it hit me.

All of the potatoes were exactly the same size. They came from potatoes that had been mercilessly graded, then cut in half and prepared. This was how I knew that they'd come out of a packet, rather than straight out of someone's field. Nothing like my roasties, which are made with whatever potatoes are in the top of the sack and can involve sizes from giant to quite small. I cut them to an even size, which leaves them a variety of interesting shapes.

It's yet another example of how people have been educated to believe that what they want is consistency, when really we'd all be much happier if we chose our produce with the primary concern being taste.

As an addendum, I'd like to say that we did get some stuff done with the rest of our day! It was a bread baking day, and there was quite a bit of sorting, cleaning and cooking achieved with the rest of the afternoon.