Recently, Whole Foods caught a fair amount shit for introducing a produce butcher. Or better put, a single location of Whole Foods in Midtown Manhattan caught some shit for testing out the idea of having someone cut your fruits and vegetables for you — for roughly a dollar a pound. “An amazing convenience or a desperate sign of laziness?” asked Modern Farmer.
Why can’t it be both? As a man whose grill specialty is vegetables, I go with a rustic chop at all times mainly because I’m all thumbs when it comes to cutting them any other way. I would like to slice and dice in a more aesthetically pleasing manner — for instance, the Whole Foods produce butcher offers julienne, mince and dice options, although not, per Modern Farmer, “the trendy ‘spiralize’ method of turning vegetables (zoodles!) into long noodle shapes.” But a couple of things inevitably happen when I attempt to wield my cold steel in this way:
1) I slice off some portion of the top of my finger; or
2) It takes me as long to free my fruits and vegetables from their natural shape as it does to prepare the entire meal.
If I’m being honest, then, I’ve been cheating for a while. Case in point: Though almost every meal I make comes with cubed butternut squash, I’ve never taken a knife to my favorite gourd — to cube it or otherwise. While I know how to make butternut squash that tastes great (oil, salt, pepper, sweet balsamic glaze), I have no idea how to separate its opaque exterior from its orange interior. And so, each time I make it, I purchase it pre-sliced from my local grocery chain — probably at about a $4 markup from simply buying a whole one and cubing it myself.
So if you want to bag on Whole Foods for anything, it’s that it somehow thinks cutting your produce for you is an original idea.
Josh Schollmeyer
Josh Schollmeyer is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of MEL. Previously, he dreamt up the popular Kinja site Playboy SFW, an effort to bring back the brand’s commitment to social-sexual values (but with a 21st century sensibility), and helped make The Chicagoan, a coffee-table-book like magazine that doubled as a love letter to his hometown and that sold out in under a month. He’s written a bunch of stuff, too, most notably, the best-selling ebook Enemies, A Love Story, about the bromance between dueling film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. (The Atlantic included it as one of the 10 Best Oral Histories from 2012 You Haven’t Had Time to Read Yet — admittedly, it was very long.) He later served as a producer on the Steve James-directed Ebert documentary, Life Itself, which was short-listed for an Oscar and won an Emmy. He was most recently named to AdWeek’s Creative 100 in the media innovators category, and chosen as a finalist for Digiday’s 2020 Publishing Executive of the Year. In another life, he helped The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists win a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He is generally the tallest blond of any room he’s in.
