Amazing Produce at Food 4 Less

Can you guess what this is? Here's a hint; it's in the produce department, and you use it in cooking and especially in salads.

Give up?

It's celery! What makes it hard to recognize is that you are looking at the bottoms and the tops of the celery bunches, neatly arrayed in precise verticle rows. Not quite the way I'm used to seeing celery in the store!

This is the Food 4 Less store in Vallejo, CA. Mike and I like to shop here because they have good prices, awesome selection, and we can find stuff we can't find at Raley's or Safeway like cotijo cheese and Campbell's Bean with Bacon and Tomato Bisque soups. We stopped here last week to pick up a few things. It was shortly after the store opened for the day and when we walked into the produce department I just stared.

All the produce was lined up perfectly, piled in meticulous pyramids, or stacked tightly in vertical cubicles. It was so amazing that we went back today, camera in hand, to take photos.

I have never seen produce arranged this way before. I don't know if this is something new that Food 4 Less is doing, or perhaps I'd never shopped there first thing in the morning, before hordes of shoppers had made a shambles out of the painstakingly organized fruits and veggies.

Following are some of the photos we took this morning:

Carrots, cabbages, and celery.

A pile of cauliflower surrounded by carrots, radishes and lettuces, amongst other stuff. Note how vertically, and tightly, the vegetables are stacked!

Broccoli, loose carrots (64 cents/lb!), and several types of lettuce.

Squashes, purple eggplant, artichokes, beets and asparagus.

Artichokes, close-up, all neatly facing the consumer.

These tangerines almost look messy! Next to them is a bin of plums, in neat lines.

Pineapples presenting their bottom-sides. Such an interesting way to display them.

Lovely oranges.

Carrots flanked by broccoli and spinach.

A close-up of the carrots. How long does it take to stack loose carrots this way??

Several types of lettuce bunches.

Orange and yellow bell peppers, mushrooms. The colors are amazing!

A long view of potatoes, peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes.

The white sections are the bottoms of green onions; in the middle are green onions again, this time with their tops facing forwards. Radishes and cilantro fill the bins on either side.

It was really a feast for the eyes and definitely a novel (to me) way to arrange produce!

One final photo: we also stopped at Wal-Mart which has a McDonald's inside. Ronald McDonald was there, just waiting for someone to sit down and have a little chat with him, so I did! (I think he likes me.)