I don’t understand the obsession with size that seems to be a part of so many elements in our world. We don’t have a television, but it seems that they get bigger every year. We have several friends and family members who have televisions that practically cover an entire wall of their house. Perhaps there is something in the experience of having movies and other videos that are larger than life in your home, but in my limited experience, even with a giant screen and a dramatic sound system, watching movies at home is different than experiencing them in a theatre. Part of the theatre experience is being part of a group of people and feeling their reactions to the experience. I don’t need a giant television at home. We have a 36” computer monitor on which we can stream videos and movies, and it is large enough for us.

It isn’t just televisions, of course. Sometimes it seems as if everything from furniture to pickup trucks keeps getting bigger and bigger. The last time we traded pickups, the new one was nearly a foot taller than the one it replaced.

Even our food is getting bigger. We visited two of our favorite fruit stands yesterday and purchased apricots, plums, peaches, and apples. It wasn’t long ago that I could find reasonably sized apples in the fruit stands, even though the grocery store seemed to stock only large apples. Now the fruit stands are also filled with apples larger than a softball. I looked for baseball-sized apples, but was disappointed. It seems that the rest of the fruit-buying public prefers large apples.

We didn’t buy onions yesterday, but we could have purchased Washington sweet Vidalia onions that were the size of a cabbage. I like Vidalia onions, but I’m pretty sure that they were developed in the south. Decades ago, when we lived in Idaho, which is somewhat famous not only for potatoes, but also for onions, yellow onions were the most common variety grown. They were good, and we enjoyed purchasing them at discount prices because we lived close to where they were grown. There are a lot of onions grown in Washington, and I guess that some of the farmers have switched to Vidalia onions. It makes sense. They are a tasty variety, and the rich volcanic soil supports root crops. But the size! What is the purpose of an onion that is so large it must be cut into quarters or smaller pieces for each use? When a recipe calls for an onion finely chopped, it doesn’t mean one of these. Perhaps a softball-sized onion would do, but a smaller one is closer to the amount of onion needed for most recipes. One of the onions we saw yesterday in the stands would make enough caramelized onions for a party of a dozen or more people.

Not everything is better when it is bigger.

For what it is worth, the plums, apricots, and peaches were standard sizes yesterday. That is good because we, too, have upsized a bit and don’t need to increase the size of our food portions continually. As we grow older, we find that we often need less food than is typically offered in restaurants. Lunch yesterday was the other half of the sandwiches we purchased for lunch the day before. We have a small cooler in which we carry the extra food for the next day. It still has leftover potatoes from dinner portions that were too large for us.

When we lived in Idaho, I used to joke that the state slogan, “Famous Potatoes,” wasn’t “Good Potatoes,” or “Tasty Potatoes.” Idaho potatoes are just famous. We had moved from North Dakota, where I found Red River russets to be delicious potatoes. The soil of southwest Idaho did, however, produce huge potatoes. We could generally find potatoes that were a pound or more, which I consider to be very large. However, some potatoes were as large as five or even 10 pounds in some of the local stores. We liked to purchase one of those huge potatoes as a gag gift for visitors and tell them, as we presented it, that it was a little cull that we had gleaned from a nearby field.

I’m happy with an 8 to 10-ounce potato with my dinner. I don’t need anything bigger. When it comes to certain foods, such as potatoes, apples, or onions, I don’t see the reason to have a single fruit that is larger than a reasonable portion. Most of us aren’t feeding large groups when we prepare food. Fruits that are a single portion make sense. As delighted as I am to have new crop apples to take home, it is a bit disappointing that many of them are so large that they will be cut in half, with one half stored in the refrigerator for a second portion. While an apple a day might keep the doctor away, twice as much apple don’t seem to have increased health benefits.

The current trend makes me wonder what the future holds. Will our grandchildren go to the fruit stand to discover apples the size of watermelons? Then again, that might be a good thing because we did notice that the fruit stands had quite a few watermelons that were much smaller than the ones that used to be common. While other fruits are getting bigger, there are smaller watermelon choices.

We have had a wonderful trip, and today we will take our fruit for a short, but breathtaking drive over the Cascade mountain to our home. We’ll eat fresh fruit, preserve some for the winter, and share some with family and friends. And we’ll recall other trips to the orchards and anticipate future trips. Who knows what we will find?