Bad Garlic

 During the last several years we have found what seems a high proportion of bad garlic. I consider garlic bad when it gets old enough to have shrunk in from the paper, so that its cloves take on a rubbery texture. I consider it worse when the clove is turning brown, worst when it has started to mold. We tend to use some garlic every week, so it is not as if we are letting a head sit for a month to molder.

This is not a failure in a single source. We buy garlic at the farmers market and at the grocery store. Both seem to sell us inferior garlic sometimes.

It seems to me that it was once less usual to find garlic gone bad. My recollection is of firm heads of garlic in the kitchen, ropes of garlic at friends' houses that looked firm. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps those ropes were in poor shape, and I discarded as much garlic then as I would now.