Lying to children is fun when they know you are being ridiculous. When you hold up a carrot like “guys look at this huge Cheeto” and they all scream “NOOOOOOOOO that’s a CARE-OTT!”
“What? No, it’s my giant Cheeto.”
“NOOOOOOO!”
When I was a camp counselor a fellow counselor claimed that any silly camp song we sang was “his next hit single” and we should all follow him on SoundCloud and he stuck by this daily and it never ceased to amuse both the adults and the children.
When children are small and learning to count and you say the numbers out of order? Peak comedy.
“How many toys are there? Let’s see… oneeee, twooo, six!”
“NO! One two three!”
“What? Are you sure? Let me try again. One, two… six?”
“Noooooo!”
Once reduced a toddler into a fit of giggles by singing “A B C D E F Q.”
on Halloween at the store i work at there was a little boy in a Batman costume, and as I was helping his mom I kept addressing him as Mr. Superman and Mr. Aquaman & he kept correcting me, “noooo, BATMAN” until they were leaving and he very seriously told me, “actully, I’m Ryan”
I grow our own vegetables. Many hybrid and heirloom varieties are bred for flavor rather than for commercial appeal and travel. There are entire species on the allotment that you can’t easily buy in stores because of this - like salsify, a root vegetable that tastes of fish and shellfish. Our neighbours happily take it to make vegan latkes of alarming similarity to fishcakes. You cannot sell it in stores because - despite looking like a white parsnip - it turns brown when you pick it if you scrape/bruise/cut the white root in any way, or damage the delicate little hairs, for some reason, it BLEEDS RED and is very upsetting to look at.
There are whole classes of foods like this. Foods that just don’t ship well or look good on supermarket shelves. Forbidden fruits. Vegetables that bleed and taste like meat. Sorry about this
This website is one of my fav places to find interesting heirloom stuff! I ordered a bunch of seeds to try growing next year I’m really excited about!
I’ve gotten and plants seeds from that site, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and they grow fantastically well for me.
I’m really looking forward to next season
Baker Creek Heirloom has good seeds but bad politics. They were going to host Cliven Bundy of the Occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Reserve who’s also pro the Capitol Riots and has made a lot of racist nastiness, although backlash made them cancel their guest list (which included other racist folks)
Highly recommend Native Seed/Search and Truelove. Baker Creek has an amazingly large catalog and has some very cool and rare stuff, but they are also Mennonites and as you might expect, they do have terrible politics as listed above, although they do some decent work preserving heirloom seeds from threatened communities.
An organization that does really interesting work preserving seed from threatened communities (and larger companies like baker creek often piggyback off of some of the work done by orgs like this and NS/S) is the Experimental Farm Network. They are very explicit about their (left-leaning) political views and you don’t have to worry about them being Problematic. They have lots of interesting and rare varieties and species you really cannot find anywhere else.
If you are looking for a wider selection of heirloom seed varieties, these two companies are very good resources as well, and carry many of the same things as Baker Creek. Afaik they are not expressly political beyond their general mission to preserve heirloom seeds (although southern exposure does a good job of preserving some very traditional african-American heirlooms from the Southeast US in particular).
Omg I hadn’t heard of the Experimental Farm Network and I am delighted! I am also completely thrilled to see people other than me remember that Baker Creek is a bunch of lying fash. They claimed they did not know about Cliven Bundy AFTER VISITING HIM IN JAIL. He was literally in jail for his anti-social bullshit when they first talked to him about the watermelons he and his mentor stole from Indigenous people and made their name on. They also take seeds from Indigenous communities globally and profit from them without sharing those profits with the communities they took the seeds from.
…I am blocked by them on Twitter after publicizing the Cliven Bundy crap, full disclosure, I have an actual feud with these people and their unethical practices.
I was trying to get signal in the goddamn Himalayas to argue with them about Bundy. *grumble*
I also second Native Seed/SEARCH as a great org doing great work. Some of their stuff is so desert-adapted it won’t grow for me, but I’ve had great luck with some of their bean varieties.
Imagine a bee rn in a hive muttering “the beekeeper is not real because he is not intervening or helping me at all with this disastrous relationship I have with another bee”. now imagine that’s you talking about the good lord. now imagine a dog with a propeller hat on
