Today’s installment of delivered produce from Mama Earth Organics had some funky-shaped white nectarines from the U.S. When I opened up the bin after I got home, I had no idea what these things were until I bit into one to try it. I love nectarines because I love crispy, crunchy food (peaches are a little too soft and sweet for my taste), but these ones weren’t round like I’d expected nectarines to be, probably because I’d only ever seen very round nectarines. These ones were flattened, which is a bit weird since they grow on trees and therefore subject to gravity, right?
The first thing that came to mind is how agribusiness and large-scale farming methods in recent years have brought a uniformity to the fruits and vegetables in the average grocery store. They’ve become increasingly larger, too, and with growing international trade it’s possible to buy ‘exotic’ stuff all year ’round. Years ago I went to Urban Fare in Yaletown in Vancouver and they were selling square watermelons grown in Japan for $99 each. (Urban Fare is known for carrying lots of insanely expensive novelty food.) When I lived in Scotland I would only buy food from Marks & Spencer when I was feeling rich — which was pretty much never — but the perfect little packages of matching tomatoes were tempting. Come to think of it, ALL the food there came in a lot of packaging and this is something I avoid these days.
Nowadays I don’t care if the produce is all different shapes and sizes, either, because that’s natural: when they grow in your garden they’re rarely the same, anyway. When we were kids at the farm in Saskatchewan we’d pull carrots out of the ground and eat them without washing, and they tasted fantastic — we really didn’t care what they looked like because they tasted so good. When I first received white carrots in my organics bin, it was like they were albino carrots, they looked more like carrot-shaped turnips. But they tasted exactly the same as the orange carrots, which is a little strange since I link the carrot flavour with the bright orange colour.
It’s been rather interesting to have little surprises in my produce bin over the past eight months, challenging the notion of what is ‘normal’ versus ‘natural’. I’m glad that we’re getting away from the idea of genetically modifying produce to achieve a perceived state of perfection. (We also need to think that way about people, too, but that’s a whole other blog post, yeah…)
