::A Geek in Korea::

I got a call from my wife today. She went to one of the larger street markets to buy fruit. She gave me a call to ask which fruit she should bring home. Seeing as I wasn’t at the market to judge the quality of produce myself, I asked her to get whatever she thought looked best. She told me she’d be getting strawberries, and then hung up.

When I got home from work, she had cooked dinner for me. We ate a salad with some of the strawberries. When I sat down to write this post, she came over and handed me a bowl of strawberries, washed, but not cut. I plucked one out of the bowl and started munching on it, holding it by the green stem. Just as I was about to bite down and enjoy the sweetness, she called out from the other room, “Be careful. One of those strawberries is bad. It fell back in when I washed them, but I don’t know which one. Watch out for it.”

She didn’t tell me what was wrong with this bad strawberry. All of a sudden the mundane task of eating a strawberry has turned into a perilous event. I’ve got to check each fruit for signs of disease.

My mind runs rampant with speculation as to which of these is the “bad” strawberry. These are greenhouse strawberries, so perhaps the lighter color, less ripe one is the “bad” one. Or maybe one of them had a bruised skin I missed before I ate it. What if the one I ate first before hearing the warning was the bad one?

Why did she tell me at all?