A fruit for all seasons?

I didn't taste my first strawberry until I came to America.

That should not surprise anybody.  I grew up in a HOT near-equatorial place.  The fruits that I ate were bananas and mangoes and guavas and jackfruits.  On the other hand, an overwhelming majority of Americans would not have even heard of something called a jackfruit, leave alone tasting the awesome fruit or the sweet that mothers made.

Living a locavore life is what we humans did until very, very, recently.  In contrast to all our collective history, grocery stores now seem to sell fruits and vegetables that I hadn't even heard of.  I am yet to try out many strange looking produce items that are on the shelves in my grocery store simply because I have no idea what to do with them, nor do I have the remotest idea of how they might taste.

Strawberries I came to appreciate.  The sweet/tart taste with vanilla ice cream, for instance, is heavenly on a hot summer afternoon.  But then, slowly as I learnt more about the fruit, the more I started getting concerned about the labor used, and the pesticides and other chemicals, the less I became fascinated with strawberries.

After the move to Oregon, in one of my classes, a student remarked that it is easy to distinguish between strawberries from California versus the Oregon produce.  The ones from California are bloated, full of water, and tasteless, he swore.

I started paying attention. He was correct.

Over the past few years, I have been thinking more and more about the fact that the stores always have most fruits and vegetables, as if there is no seasonality/  Especially strawberries.

Today’s California strawberry industry, which grows 88 percent of US strawberries, was born in the 1860s in the Pajaro Valley, straddling Santa Cruz and Monterey counties.7 There, apple orchardists experimented with planting strawberries in the rows between trees. Once they began shipping the fruit to San Francisco markets, they found strawberries to be quite lucrative.8 Land in the Pajaro Valley was ideal for strawberry production, especially in the alluvial plains where the rivers meet the seas. The sandy loam soils drained well to prevent the build-up of moisture and salt and protect a fruit that is prone to rot.9 The Mediterranean climate was no less accommodating. With the vast majority of rain falling between November and April, the warm and dry temperatures of summer protected against molds and other moisture-generated pests and diseases during the harvest season. The natural air conditioning of the Pacific Ocean was an additional advantage, in the summer bringing cool, moist air into the low-lying coastal areas, while in the wintertime keeping frosts at bay. The benefits of what some call the “eternal spring” included a long harvest season, eventually inducing breeders to develop varietals that could be harvested nearly year-round.

The strawberry story is a complex one.  As demand grew, the use of various chemicals dramatically increased.  Now, we are wiser.  In a tight regulatory framework, strawberries present us with a wonderful example of the urgency to think about sustainability--to grow the fruit in plenty, with as little environmental impacts as possible, and while treating the labor fairly.

the strawberry case illustrates that sustainability itself is not a singular goal that can be achieved all at once. Instead, striving for sustainability in agriculture presents inescapable trade-offs in the use of resources and materials, not to mention social goals around working conditions, farmer livelihoods, and affordability. It’s time we started having a public conversation about the fact that those trade-offs exist and how we want to navigate them.

I, for one, have pretty much stopped buying strawberries from the stores.

We humans are ugly and imperfect. So, we take it out on fruits and veggies?

I was no different from the kids I knew--we didn't want bananas with blemishes on them.  We wanted only the perfect looking ones.  The elders tried convincing us that the ones with dark spots were really the tastier ones, but we said "no, thanks." Well, we never said "no, thanks" because the old culture did not have a place for "thanks" in everyday conversation.

Banana with blemishes. 

Cauliflower with worms. 

Carrots that were bent. (Thankfully, that led to the baby carrots!)

A never ending list, it now seems like.

As if the "fair skin" weren't enough of a discriminatory practice, we were highly superficial in judging even vegetables and fruits simply based on how they looked!

Yes, a real tomato. Misshapen. Not perfect. But, a tomato. Source

Now, with more fruits and vegetables than we can ever possibly eat, we consumers are even worse--we demand nothing but perfection in the fruits and vegetables that we purchase.  But, it doesn't take even half a brain to figure out that nature always does not turn out perfections.  I am a living proof of that ;)

So, whatever happens to the imperfect produce?

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that high cosmetic standards in the retail industry exclude 20 to 40 percent of fresh produce from the market. Sometimes farmers can sell those unwanteds to processors making jam or cider or pickles, but as those systems rely increasingly on mechanization, they become less flexible when it comes to shape and size. Tons of food — 800 to 900 million tons globally each year, the weight of 9,000 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers — rot in storage or don’t make it out of the fields because farmers can’t find a market.

Aha, you didn't think about this, eh!

Cucumbers should be straight, cauliflower florets should be tightly held, and rhubarb stalks should be ruby red. If not, retailers tell farmers, consumers won’t buy them.

A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a couple of cucumbers harvested from her own garden. They were misshapen. I would never have bought that kind of cuke at the store.  But, because it was from my friend's garden, and it was a friendly gift, I ate those cukes.  Boy they were tasty!

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global food wastage, about half of which occurs during production and post-harvest handling and storage, was responsible for 3.6 billion tons of CO2 equivalent emissions in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available; that’s more CO2 than Brazil, Japan and Australia together emitted in 2011. Wasted food also takes 250 cubic kilometers of water to produce every year, which is 38 times the amount used by all households in the United States combined.

By now, are you also feeling guilty like I am?  No?  Ok, there's more then:

By insisting on perfect-looking produce, customers also cheat themselves of taste and variety. Apple breeders used to select specifically for russetting because it was associated with longer shelf life. That’s how we got Hudson’s Golden Gem, a delicious variety that’s a favorite among my farmer friends. But you’ll never find a Gem in a standard grocery store today, precisely because of that russetting. We’ve decided that apples should be shiny, not rough; large, not small; and red or green, but definitely not brown; so now what we find in stores are piles of uniform Red Delicious apples with latex-like skin, mealy flesh and no complexity of flavor. Customers are missing out on the pleasures of a russetted apple: the coarse texture against the tongue and the concentrated flavor of the dense flesh that accompanies it.

Are you thinking what I am thinking?  What the heck is a russetted apple, right?  Hey, I can't tell you everything--do some work on your own, at least some time! ;)

If only we can learn from the French, who have made a fashion campaign out of this issue:

Source

What is the deal?

One French grocer, Intermarché, began buying “ugly” produce in 2014 and selling it at slightly reduced prices at several locations; the success prompted the company to expand the initiative to all of its stores.

That's the deal, dear reader: charge more for the "perfect" ones and less for the "imperfect" ones.  The market system works, even if we cannot access the inner morals!

Now, you know what to do the next time you are in the grocery store.  Yep, search for the imperfections--you won't find them because they never even make it to the store!