Organic vegetable box

My Eco Self has signed up with rapture for an organic box scheme. "It’s worth every penny," is enthused to anyone who will listen. £10 seems a lot for a few vegetables, argue the more financially astute. It’s worth every penny, reiterates My Eco Self firmly, and you get free recipes. You can get free recipes at Tesco, argues an unconvinced friend. My Eco Self has performed a cost-benefit analysis to justify the box. Previous weekends were taken up by treks to the farmer’s market, a two hour round trip via the coffee shop for a refuelling fair trade coffee and the Sunday papers. Cost: Fair Trade coffee, 2 hours of leisure time, and a health risk too, with the risk of an earlier back injury coming back to haunt from lugging bags of root vegetables around. Benefits: Box comes to your door, with special organic recipes. Food neurotic friend comes round on the scrounge. Food neurotic friend, a travel journalist for a national newspaper, is obsessed with local, seasonal food. He scrutinises the box. "Are you sure those plums are local?" he asks, smelling the scent of an overseas asyplum seeker. "The best money I’ve ever spent," insists My Eco Self, offering him and every dinner guest for weeks a lemony beetroot risotto as the only solution to using those damn beetroots, staining everything in sight. Another cost: Food Neurotic Friend slips a few apples into his backpack. “You won’t be able to eat all this, anyway,” he says, on his way out the door.