Last night I dreamed I was in the grocery store looking for taco toppings, and wandered into the “New Produce” aisle — the place, of course, where new species are kept.
Nestled next to an orange lettuce was a bouquet of vegetable berries, clusters of vines dripping with different colored berries, translucent with liquid inside like a snow globe.
Each colored berry held an intense extract of vegetable: crimson for red pepper, pale green cucumber, orange for carrot, light brown for butternut squash. They were rich and beautiful and I knew how each one would taste, how it would explode in my mouth like a gel capsule of vitamin E.
I imagined sprinkling them fresh on top of tacos, as we do shredded lettuce or diced tomatoes, and it struck me as the most brilliant discovery in the agricultural world.
I actually woke up disappointed they don’t exist.