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.