what's that ticking noise?

Yesterday I arrived home to find that my family had gone green in my absence. My family, which has always been paranoid of healthy food tasting badly. My family, which as a collective shudders away from anything "light" or "diet" as being inferior in taste. We'd rather have the calories.

These are the people who freaked out when we accidentally got 1 percent milk. These people include my parents, who, if not outright pooh-poohing global warming and shrinkage, certainly had great skepticism toward the topics.

This summer, Llama and I bought broccoli for a meal we were cooking. We inadvertently bought organic broccoli and freaked out when we got home, spending 10 minutes picking minuscule black bugs off the vegetables before giving up and boiling them. We served them to the rest of the oblivious family as we carefully avoided eating them ourselves.

So it was with some surprise that I opened our fridge to find organic milk and cream yesterday.
Apparently the surprise was not universal. I asked Emma, my 16 year old sister (hi!), who lives at home, what brought the change on.

"We were filling the hole you and Hannah left when you went to college," was her first reply. And then: "We didn't go organic. America went organic, so we jumped in..." This must have seemed to serious, and she got silly again.
"We came out of the closet, we were always organic deep inside." She then mentioned something about how we didn't have much access to organic food in Egypt.

Had I misjudged my family all this time? No. But maybe they had more green potential than I gave them credit for.