Vegetable persons and sacks of sugar

I was shopping for food the other day with a friend. We were contemplating the broccoli and salad offerings. I asked her what she thought of the choices; and she said, 'I don't know, I am not much of a vegetable person'.

In the U.S., you hear statements like this all the time. I am not a vegetable person. I am not a fruit person. I am a meat person. They puzzled me at first because at home in Russia, saying something like that would be borderline ridiculous - like claiming that you are not much into breathing air. Fruit and vegetables are a staple part of everyone's diet; ubiqitous, cheap, grown on small farms or in people's own gardens and orchards. In the U.S., eating vegetables is not the cheapest option; you are better off saving pennies eating high calory junk foods.

Seasonal abundance of fruit and vegetables in Russia leads to another oddity, this time from the U.S. perspective. When I was little, I remember my family buying 50 kilos (100 lb) of apples in one go in September to last through the winter. At the dinner table with several families present, you would hear them discussing stockpiling potatoes for the winter. You would buy them in 50 kg (100lb) sacks - sometimes as many as half a dozen if you had a big family. And in early summer you stock up on sugar (sold in the same size sacks). That way you could make preserves and jams when the fruit arrives. By the end of the summer, the shelves in pantries and cellars are lined up with jars of pickles, marinated tomatoes and peppers, apple jam, and strawberry preserves.

My grandmother bakes a lot; she used to buy flour by the sack. A friend of mine had a sack of sugar under the kitchen table (hard to find a good spot in a small apartment for the monster bag). She noticed that her two fox terriers looked tipsy half the time. It turned out they bit through the sack and were getting high sucking sugar.