My Mama Done Raised Me Right

Yesterday I was in the produce aisle of the grocery store and while picking up a bunch of parsley, another bunch that was stuck to mine came loose and fell to the floor. I retrieved it and put it in my cart, to be discarded later. No way was I going to return that parsley to the produce stand after being on a floor that had been trampled by hundreds of dirty shoes.

However, as I was picking up the floor parsley, the guy next to me dropped several large mushrooms from the fresh mushroom bin. They scattered all over the floor. To his credit he picked up every errant mushroom, but to my shock he returned them all to the mushroom bin!

Had his wife been with him, I'm sure she would have slapped the back of his head. Yes, mushrooms grow in dirt, but the floor of the grocery store was none too clean, as I discovered when I bent to pick up the parsley and got an eye-level view of the toe-kick space under the veggie bins.

When I was a child, I believed in the universal rule that any food that fell on the floor could be instantly sanitized by blowing on it. Now that I know better, I thoroughly wash my grocery store veggies and fruits before using them. After all, some unknown person before me could have dropped them on the floor!