Asparagus.
One time I cooked asparagus for my husband and I to eat with baked chicken, and although I ate my portion without incident, he questioned me as to why his serving had grains of sand in every bite. I was skeptical, but in fact, when I took a couple of his asparagus stalks to eat for myself, I found he wasn’t exaggerating: there were bits of the vegetable which produced a marked sandgrain crunch. I shrugged. "I’m not sure, it is gritty. Mine was fine." "I like asparagus, but I won’t trust it for awhile. How did sand get into it?" "Maybe it absorbed into the stalks from the soil somehow. I don’t know how asparagus works." "Well maybe you should figure that out before you give it to me!" We laughed. And I forgot about it for a few days. And then I realized I knew nothing about the asparagus plant or how it grows. So I did some reading. And I learned that gritty asparagus is not unusual, but rather common, and especially likely with loca...
