lifestyle

Come on, people, a Veggie Pick n Mix will not change your life.

When I was a kid, I loved going to the grocers.

Yes, grocers. Not the supermarket, not the overpriced vegan-friendly-international-importer-of-gluten-free-luxury-items.

An old fashioned, suburban, GROCER.

This is what vegetables looked like in the Olden Days, folks.

It was shaped like a barn, with a bustling interior of wooden crates spilling over with fresh fruit and veggies. Italian men with hairy sausage fingers would unload trolleys of fat yellow bananas, and round balls of mozzarella, and spicy-smelling herbs.

Whatever you bought needed to be washed thoroughly before cooking, because it was usually covered in soil, having been ripped from the ground just hours earlier.

It was dirty and wonderful and organic, long before anyone started to use that word to describe a muffin.

Apparently those days are over, however, because today I SAW THIS:

Ta da!

Introducing the all-new Pick’N’Mix Veggie Bar!

Are you stuck for time, and can’t spare three minutes to chop your pumpkin? Or maybe you have trouble recognising your vegetables in their original form? Well fear not, because now all you need for dinner is a pair of tongs and a pot, and you can cook just like they did in the Olden Days!

Puh-lease, people.

In this week’s major eye roll moment, the internet gifted us with a photo that conclusively proved the human race is headed towards extinction at an increasingly rapid rate. New Zealand’s ‘New World’ supermarket chain is ignoring all of our groans as they work to install pre-chopped veggie bars, where you can simple fill your bag and go.

I’m not sure if the Pick’N’Mix veggie bar was dreamt up by someone with an aversion to knives, or a health nut who really, really misses their lollies – but this is truly a sad moment for mankind.

Did you know that it was just a couple of hundred years ago that people had to dig in the ground for their fruit and veg? Heck, a couple of thousand years before that they weren’t even sure WHAT they were eating! Potato or poisonous root? Rock or rockmelon? Who bloody knew!

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Do you hate chopping veggies? Here is a genius hack on mastering cherry tomatoes. Thank us later. (Post continues after video)

Video via Dave Hax

Our arched eyebrows aside, New World store manager Chris Grace reckons pre-cut veggies are perfect for young professionals who are busy/important/in a hurry (we’ve all met those types in the aisles before, ammiright?) or for the elderly who might struggle to chop things at home.

“It eliminates any waste,” he said.

“They can pick out exactly how much they want of the different types, mushrooms, or courgettes or cucumbers or whatever, and the other factor is they don’t have to go through the physical exercise of cutting up pumpkins or cauliflowers.”

It’s a zucchini, Chris. A zucchini.

While I am all for time-saving concepts – particularly those involving food – this has really gone too far. How long will those chopped veggies stay crisp for? Who is doing all that chopping? Is that person OK? All I can conjure up is some poor convict chained below the deck of HMAS Supermarket chopping millions of potatoes whilst we all stomp around above deck in our gym clothes scrolling the Taste app section titled ’15 Minute Meals’.

Oh, and the smell. Seriously, the SMELL. Everyone knows that chopped up broccoli that’s been sitting around for a while has a distinct fart smell, and c’mon – a whole tray of chopped up onions? What genius dreamt up that concept?

People aren’t even going to be able to get close without their eyes watering over. The supermarket is going to have to start issuing special goggles and nose clips to conquer the stench whilst Pick’N’Mixin’ your pre-chopped veggies.

And that, people, is called de-evolution.

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