While shopping for groceries today at Food 4 Less, I was winding my way out of the produce section when I took a momentary detour to pick up some sweet potatoes. There was a slightly elderly lady standing in front of the sweet potatoes, sifting through them intently. When I picked up a healthy-looking one, she said, without looking at me, “It’s too big.”

I put it down.

“You want the small ones. They’re the sweetest.” She told me, in somewhat more detail, that she knew a lot about sweet potatoes.

“So I want the smallest ones, like this,” I said, holding up one that measured about six inches long and two inches wide.

“Yeah, the small ones are the sweetest. These are all too big. You want the smallest ones.”

I thanked her warmly for the tip and walked back to my cart with two small sweet potatoes. As I stepped back over to grab a third, I told her to have a good day, and then resumed my course towards the salmon. A young woman took my place by the sweet potatoes and began to put one in her basket.

“That one’s too big. The small ones are sweeter.”