Shoot the fruit (and veggies)

I am food obsessed. I love planning our menu for the week. I even love - gulp - grocery shopping. Now, like so many other families, we are on a budget of sorts and I try to save money when I shop. Not only do I get the coupons out of the newspapers, I subscribe to the coupon websites, so I get a slew of coupon emails every week. I also have requested that the local grocery stores' circulars be emailed to me as well. Saturday morning comes and I am often at the kitchen table with coupons and my sale lists. I coordinate our weekly menu accordingly, factoring in the usual mom kind of stuff like how we need quickly prepared meals on guitar lesson night. My husband is great at getting the meals ready for us to pull together when we get home. The other night - taco night - he did all the prep work while we were gone. Take a look at this. He's awesome, right?

I also love to take photographs of food. The colors and textures are as captivating as those of flowers. Recently we went to Whole Foods in Portland. Joe and I had gone once before (we don't get to the big city much) and I had remembered how beautiful the food displays were. So this time I came prepared. When we arrived, my husband knew that I was planning on taking pictures in the market on a busy Sunday morning and therefore would embarrass him. Some people get squeamish if someone they're with calls attention to themselves and therefore anyone associated with them. My daughter wasn't fazed and in fact, hollered across the produce department, "Hey Mom, check out the avocados!" So, with Joe slinking over to the organic hummus and Nola juggling the lemons, I started taking photos of the amazingly displayed peppers - a personal favorite - the carrots, the zucchini, the summer squash - it was all too much. No other department holds the riot of color that the produce department does. There was a guy working there, putting out some new veggies, and prior to the first click, I asked permission to shoot the fruit. Turns out he had just moved from Bangor to Portland and had worked at our local natural food store, so he was more than accomodating. I complimented his produce and, thought he could have, he didn't take the credit for the array. He said they have a guy whose job it is to prepare the display. Amazing. We call this "food porn". Here is some of his awesome work.

I'm also a huge fan of farmer's markets for this same reason. The baskets of tomatoes, piles of potatoes, and those fabulous wooden crates of greens just suck me right in. Most folks are pretty cool about my photographing their goods. Sometimes I actually buy something.



I rarely take my camera to my local supermarket. I'm there for business. Get the stuff on my list. Get it for the best price I can. Get out. Get it home and get it put away.

Perhaps I should reconsider this. Take a look around your local markets and see what you can see. They say that you should eat the rainbow - in colors on your plate - and if this stuff is any indication of what's available in the market, it's going to be a delicious road to the end of the rainbow.


oh - one last image to share from my visit to Whole Foods. This was a couple of weeks before Easer and I couldn't resist.

Remind me to write about my obsession with signs sometime