Celery Reform Now

We need celery reform in this country and we need it now.

Picture this: You need a little celery for a recipe, probably some potato salad, or maybe to put out with crudité. You head on over to the produce aisle. Your most cost-effective option is buying a bag of celery hearts. You add the celery to the potato salad or put it on a tray with the cauliflower and cucumbers. It works out nicely and everybody eats and has a good time.

Only there’s a glaring problem: You still have a ton of celery left. What was in that package was way more than you needed. It’s a problem because you don’t entertain much and don’t eat celery on its own. So that green veggie will sit unused in your crisper, getting less and less crispy until you find it months later and throw it out.

How can we solve this? How the hell can we solve this?

The main problem, ladies and gentlemen, is that there are too few options for buying celery in America. The bag in the produce section is cheap but leads to too much waste. You can buy pre-sliced celery in plastic containers but it’s actually more expensive for the amount that you need. You could order a bunch of Buffalo wings and scavenge the celery from the takeout containers, but that seems expensive and complicated, even if you request extra celery each time.

The problem is not just limited to celery, as many products come in inconvenient sizes. Coffee K-cups usually come in packages of 12. You might think, “An even dozen. How logical.” But this is deceiving. I drink one cup of coffee per day and go food shopping once a week. If K-cups came in packages of 14, I would only need to buy them every two weeks. At 12 per carton, this destabilizes my grocery list as I sometimes have to buy K-cups once a week.

I trust you can see the conundrum here.

I don’t claim to have all the answers to the celery problem; that’s for the nation’s scientists to puzzle out. Therefore, in these divisive times, let’s all join together and push for saner, cheaper packaging for celery. I say enough is enough. Let’s end the pointless waste of this calorie-negative potato salad additive.