First of all, I have to say that the chances of Mickey D making any money off of me were doomed when I was still inside of my mother. She ate no junk food when she was pregnant, had no soda, had a ton of fruits and vegetables (mostly organic), and ate nothing with chemicals or even regular sugar. I probably spent as many of my early years in greenmarkets as I did at playgrounds. When I started playing soccer at age seven, my coach would tell us to eat bananas, chicken, and broccoli and to forget McDonald’s and Burger King. When I went on school trips though, teachers would sometimes take us to McDonald’s for lunch. You would think that when given the chance I would rebel against my mother and my coach, but the strange thing is I didn’t. I hated the smell of McDonald’s and I still do.
When I walked into the McDonald’s in Union Square for this assignment, that sickly smell of grease shot up my nose and went straight to my brain. I walked right out without talking to anybody. I crossed over to the Union Square Green Market and went straight to the Martin’s Pretzel stand, where I have been doing business since fourth grade. These pretzels are the bomb diggity. The extremely nice guy at Martin’s Pretzels gave me a free sample as he always does and told me a few things about the company. He said that “Martin’s pretzels are to machine-made pretzels what a BMW is to a Yugo.” (I checked Google, and the Yugo was made in Serbia. It was voted the worst car of the millennium.) They make the pretzels by hand unlike other pretzel makers, and they can only make twelve a minute. Making them by machine changes the texture of the dough and hurts the taste. They are also boiled in water and soda before they are baked, and the soda makes the crust incredibly crispy unlike all other pretzels I’ve tried. Almost every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, when I come up out of the Union Square subway, I stop at Martin’s, and the same guy gives me free pretzels. I often buy a bag
for lunch, and then at the end of the day around six I sometimes get more free ones on my way home.
The other stand I know well at the Union Square Green Market is the Breezy Hill Orchards one. The items I usually buy there are the cranberry walnut cake and the apple cider doughnuts. The cranberry walnut cake is fresh and juicy and not really the consistency of cake. It smells of cranberries and orange juice and even though it is the size of a big brownie I can eat it in about thirty seconds. It has fruit juice in it but no sugar so my mother will always get me one. On my own I buy the apple cider doughnuts which do have sugar in them. They smell strongly of apple cider and are incredibly moist. You get three in a bag for $2.50, and sometimes they are my lunch. The women who work at this stand are always friendly, and because I don’t go to soccer practice until close to the time the market closes, they sometimes gives me free doughnuts. The woman I talked to yesterday told me that the farm in Staatsburg, New York, where all their products come from is really beautiful and a great place to visit. They have also just opened a stand at the green market in Brooklyn not far from where I live. Great! Now I can get their doughnuts on Sundays.
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