I was cooking dinner tonight, when it hit me.
I remember when the green beans got weird. It was so scary when the green beans got weird. It was early pandemic, and green beans went from being something that were really easy for us to get… to becoming practically impossible to get. There were all kinds of weird supply chain shortages where we were.
We hunted and hunted. And only just found green beans.
Even then, it was in odd quantities. Strange brands we’d never bought before. But we found some canned green beans. And we were happy, if a bit disconcerted.
But then it all changed. The green beans got weird again. In a new way. We’d open up the cans and we kept finding strange parts of the beans in them, the bits that I usually miss when I clean fresh ones manually. Even when we were able to go back to our former brand, even when we were able to reliably find green beans, the processing would be strange on them.
It wasn’t a big deal. But it was scary.
Because if everything was weird enough that green beans were all wrong, if the economy and life and just people — their attention spans, their existence, their health — were disrupted enough that green beans weren’t right…
Then what next?
And there were a lot of what nexts. Some of it temporary. Some of it likely long-lasting. And some of it’s permanent.
Look, nothing been quite right for a while. There’s no getting around it.
And I was cooking dinner tonight when I expected to see a bunch of nasty bits in the green beans. Like I have been for a while.
Frankly, I did find a stringy piece. But that’s much less than I found the last half dozen times. This is a new batch of cans, and so far they seem better.
And maybe it’s not much. But it gave me some hope. Maybe the green beans will bounce back one day. And maybe a lot of other things that I’ve written off.
You never know.