Feeding Frenzy

This weekend I sampled my tamales and did a couple of cooking demos at the 8th annual Vegfest, a festival dedicated to encouraging folks to make plant-based food choices.

It's the largest vegetarian festival in North America, and it's run entirely by volunteers. I find this inspiring, though I wish there was more of an emphasis on fresh food rather than processed items.

Each year, during the last hour of the event, they start selling off the leftover perishable product. It's a feeding frenzy. One year I picked up a bunch of stuff but I ended up not eating half of it, so since then I've stayed out of the fray. But this year a friend who was helping out in my booth made some impressive acquisitions, so I ended up getting some things too.

In general, I try not to buy anything on sale that I wouldn't buy if it wasn't on sale, unless the price is the only reason I don't buy it normally. But I don't always keep to that. I came home with a bag of frozen entrees. I hope I eat them all eventually.

I think we're predisposed to horde food, and that it goes back to our hunter-gatherer days when we didn't know for sure where the next meal was coming from. It's hard to push back against tens of thousands of years of genetic programming.