"After all, if you’ve never tasted a really fresh peach, how would you know what you’re missing?"
This is something that has driven me crazy about living in New England, and drove me even crazier when I worked at Whole Foods where all the guys working in the produce department were either from South America and had, like me, given up on ever having genuinely fresh fruit in a store here or were from New England and didn't actually know what genuinely fresh fruit, besides maybe apples if their families had ever taken them to any kind of farm, and maybe two or three kinds of berries, was like. Whole Foods -- which I'm only pointing to because it does the best with produce of all the local big grocery chains here -- is making motions about trying to fill its shelves with more local products, but the fact is that even most of its produce, most of the year here, is from at least a thousand miles away, picked underripe so as not to spoil on the way here and so as to have a shelf life at all once it gets here, and is of limited variety again because of the whole travel-and-shelf-life thing and the whole uniform-appearance-or-the-shopper-will-be-scared-
to-buy-it thing.
Part of this is trying to limit loss, because produce is not much of a profit center for the modern grocer. Part of this is ignorance among consumers. I don't think I know a single person from around here who has ever tasted a peach right off a tree, so ripe it falls into your hand when you touch it, warm and fragrant from the nourishing sun, gushing juice all over your face when you pierce its tender skin with your teeth. And you cannot explain ripeness vs. store ripeness to someone who hasn't experienced it. (I discovered that many are even intimidated or icked-out if you try, because what you've described is too intimate, too messy, too not what they're used to. You're also likely to be thought of as snobby for pointing out the difference between this experience and what they're used to.) And it's ridiculously frustrating when even the people stocking the shelves and bins haven't experienced it, or have experienced it only as something far away and downright foreign.
And with so many businesses trying to be bigger and bigger and ever bigger, including Whole Foods, I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Part of the problem is also consumers having lost touch with the notion of eating seasonally. ("So what if it's July? My child wants an apple every day for lunch, a red, shiny apple, so the store'd better have apples, and they'd better all be perfect.") A book I like very much about this is Roger Swain's Groundwork, which I also recommend for consumption in the hammock.
I grew up in Apple country in NY. All spring you worried about late frosts, then summer drought, or almost as bad, too much summer rain, then early fall frosts, bugs, then labor to pick. But I remember having at least dozen different apples, and not a single granny smith. The apple orchards had great tasting, but maybe somewhat blems on them. Today, the red delicious is a misnamed species. Red, yes its red, big, high shoulders, clean, but well, muted taste. Its crisp, but its not very sweet. Macintosh, not as red, rounder, but very flavorful, much more than bland red delicious, or its cousin, yellow. Most stores that cater to mass marketing, WalMart, the largest grocer in the country, wants fruit that looks good. People reach for spotless looking, although less than sweet apples.
Today, the new kid on the block is the Fuji, an apple that was not grown in the US until the late 80's. Its sweet, almost as sweet as a mac, but its sized like a delicious.
We may be able to genetically produce a better apple, but its taste will always be secondary to its look.
Masumoto's peach, whose name I've forgotten just now, is still on the relatively local market -- I see it at the Berkeley Bowl every year. It's pretty good, though there are a few that sometimes show up better. Depends on the season.
Friend of ours in Berkeley had a volunteer peach that came up in his compost heap. The peaches were huge, white, and tasty as hell, which is unusual in the fog belt. He kept the tree small and threw a length of bird netting over it to keep out the squirrels -- and to do that, he also had to draw it shut purse-style on the bottom. That meant that the peaches, when ripe enough to fall, fell into a hammock of birdnet and he could roll them down to where the net was tied around the trunk and take them out.
I think the tree died when he got interested in other projects, alas.
Ron, is it Sun Crest? I envy your friend his late, great volunteer peach tree. We get decent peaches from the Hill Country some years; I'm hoping that with the rain, this year will be one of them.
Dammit, another book for my "must read" list. Thanks.
Commenting by HaloScan
