Skip to main content

Curious Substitutions

Today's story, much like many of the recent ones, is about groceries during a pandemic. There have been a few amusing stories along those lines already, including a fun way to describe items that we are craving at a particular point in time. As I've mentioned before, we do prefer to have groceries delivered where possible, since it minimizes our contact with others. It involves a little bit more planning and sometimes we have to adjust due to availability, but it's mostly worked out so far.

For this particular order, there were two items of note: bok choy and oat milk. Let's start with the oat milk, shall we? I don't remember at what point we started to drink oat milk, but it's been a reasonable substitution for other kinds of milk (we actually sampled a few of them before settling on that). So, I added it to our order, and allowed substitutions. Generally speaking, we prefer getting some version of that item to not getting it at all. Sure enough, we got a notification that some other brand/size was going to be substituted for the one we'd asked for.

Well, we didn't mind, since that was the whole point of allowing substitutions. When we received our groceries, however, we were greeted with this:

Notice that this does not say "milk"

Now, I'm not super well-versed in the land of coffee accoutrement, but I remember thinking that this was wrong. I mean, there is a difference between milk and creamer. Heck, this is why half-and-half is a thing, and I've at least heard that enough times that I knew that this substitution was an odd one.

Still, I could sort of understand what had happened in that particular case. After all, it's easy to miss a word or grab a bottle that has been misplaced. And since I tend to put the milk in my coffee anyway, I figured we could try this newfangled creamer thing.

The other substitution in that order, however, had me laughing. If you remember from the earlier paragraph, that item had been bok choy. Bok choy is actually a fairly large vegetable, so I had only asked for one of them. To give you some idea of how much food that is, the estimated weight for one normal-sized bok choy was something like 1.2 pounds. Like I said, it's not a small vegetable. In terms of size, it's like a celery on steroids.

Since the bok choy had been unavailable, our bok choy had been substituted with baby bok choy. That seems like a reasonable enough switch, since they both have the same name. One is just bigger than the other. So, how much baby bok choy did they give us?

This much

That is decidedly not one pound worth of food. In fact, it is precisely one baby bok choy's worth of food. Yup, the person looked at the order, and figured a one-for-one substitution made sense. Since this was an online order, I actually know how much food that was: about a third of a pound. Yup, we got like a fourth of what we wanted. Like I said earlier, some bok choy beats no bok choy, but I couldn't help but laugh at what had happened with our grocery order.

This pandemic sure has led to some interesting food/grocery shenanigans.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New York City Trip (Day 3)

By the third day of the trip, I was tired enough from the previous day's adventures/subway rides that I felt like sleeping in. And sleep in I did. I think I woke up at something like 11:30 or noon. Of course, that meant that a later start to the day, which started the vicious cycle all over again. By the time we rolled into Manhattan, it was about two in the afternoon. I had tentatively set aside Sunday to see something on Broadway, so we headed over to the tkts booth for discount tickets. There were actually various 3PM options, and after mulling our options, we figured it'd be a good idea to catch one of those. We settled on The Toxic Avenger , which was actually an off-Broadway option. However, we hadn't eaten yet, and the show started about 15 minutes after we got our tickets. Enter the food carts. There happened to be one right outside the theater, and the guy charged a little bit of a premium for the convenience. Still, I was hungry, and I had yet to try...
1 comment
Read more

Moment of Truth

I forget where I first heard it (I think it might have been Descartes), but I have long been a fan of the notion that certain things just have a " ring of truth " to them. If you've never heard the idiom before, the basic idea is that some things are super-true. They are not just true, but they are so obviously true, that as soon as you hear them, you recognize the truthiness inherent in them. I usually get excited when I hear one of these, since it means that I am a tiny bit less ignorant from that moment forward. For the first time in memory, though, I experienced the ring of truth. First, let me paint the scene with a little bit of background. I'd made plans to have dinner with my friend, but we'd agreed to play it by ear. The end result was that we ended up settling on a pretty late dinner in a local spot. That worked out just fine, since we weren't shooting for gourmet, we just wanted to grab some food and catch up in the process. So, we headed out to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Good Things ...

August 8, 2009. Over twelve years ago, I started blogging with this simple post . I didn't really have a great reason for starting the blog, other than I wanted to try it out. I wanted to try writing and putting it where others could read it. I don't know, it just seemed like a new adventure to try. Along the way, there have been all sorts of posts and all sorts of life events, but through it all, I kept writing. It just became a part of what I do at some point. It wasn't a matter of whether I was going to write a blog post, it was a matter of when. The Mild Wife has described it as a "writing practice," and it was one of the reasons why I kept writing. Honestly, it's good practice, and it gives me an opportunity to hone my craft. I'm no professional author, but we all have to write stuff in our everyday lives. Why not give yourself reps to get better at it? However, I think it's time for that practice to change. My weekly anecdotes sure kept me amused...
Post a Comment
Read more