cucumber quandries

[xela]

I picked up lunch at Whole Foods, and as I was making my salad, noticed something I've noticed many times before: The cucumbers had clearly been sliced by hand (or at any rate were intended to appear to have been): they were an arbitrary range of thicknesses in the 1/4 to 3/4 inch range Which for at least the past ten years has been what I usually find at salad bars, and always leaves me wondering

• Why? Why, when there are a variety of readily available implements for slicing cucumbers (1) to a uniform thickness and (2) much more quickly than can be done with a knife, slice them by hand? Do they imagine customers will look at the random thicknesses and go Oh, hand-work! That's class, that is?
• If so, why hand-slice them so thick? Surely one can at least take from the fact that the various popular vegetable slicers produce slices far closer to 3/16 inch than 3/4 a hint that people probably prefer thinner slices?

Since I was at Whole Foods rather than a restaurant, and was buying a salad to take home, I resolved this annoyance as I usually do in that circumstance: I went to the other side of the store and bought a cucumber to slice uniformly and thinly into my salad. Which left me wondering something else I've often wondered: Why are cucumbers (and as far as I can tell, only cucumbers, sometimes sold in the produce section, set out in a bin like any other vegetable — but individually wrapped in plastic?

Comments

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

Maybe you are unusual in liking thin cucumber slices? And since vegetable slicers make thin slices, other people don't use them for this purpose, and are forced to cut them by hand? The problem with thin cucumber slices in a salad which is not going to be eaten right away is that the cucumbers then have more surface area to ooze water and get everything else soggy. Which is probably why people do not put tomato slices in salad...

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Thing is, I'm pretty sure it didn't used to be this way. That is, I'm all but certain that I remember salad bars having uniformly and thinly sliced cucumbers, 20 years ago or so.

[narya.livejournal.com]

But the odd ones are much more fun for building things!

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I'm now envisioning a cucumber model of a fieldstone hearth....

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Any half-skilled chef can slice a cucumber quickly, thinly and evenly. So they've no excuse, and anyway, I agree about the labour-saving devices. They're quite thumb-saving too. For a while it was my job to spend every morning making salads and my right thumb got a lot of deep gouges (I'm left-handed).