Virtuous Fruit

I've long been fascinated by food.
Modern man lives with terrible paradoxes with regard to food. For one thing, we need to understand that while 'dirty food' can kill you, sterile food can weaken you. Did you notice that the ecoli scares last year mostly or all involved organics(in two of the cases it was spinach)? This is no coincidence. You see, organic foods are grown with non-chemical fertilizers. By definition this means that substantially we are talking about excrement products as part of the composting process of the fertilizer. The good news is one can actually develop some immunity to ecoli and other so-called 'pathogens'. Otherwise there would be no special concern about Americans drinking water or dealing with ice-cubes or Popsicle from Mexico, China or Africa. Further, consider that much of the time what kills an individual named in an ecoli mortality statistic is not the ecoli it's self only but a number of other factors surrounding it:

• the person may be accustomed to pasteurized and sterilized foods (thus, little immunity)
• the person may be part of the new trend in the US towards 'organics' and thus- sinse previously they may rarely have ever been seriously sickened by food, they were exposed too quickly to food with biological contaminants (non-pasteurized foods).
• The person may have compromised immune systems ironically due to exo-genetic effects of chemical pesticides.
• The person may have too little bacterial and viral diversity in their own blood for some of the reasons already mentioned to metabolize and defend against certain biological pathogens and toxic pathogenic bi-products such as the chemicals released by ecoli.
  

In the United States, politics is in the air we breath and in the food we eat. Understand that lobbyists for industrial food industry are some of the most powerful economic and political agents in our democratic body today. With their help, we have managed to cause meats and processed foods of any sort; and by way of triangulation- especially such things as frozen pizzas or fast food: to be made the least expensive products to be found- not-withstanding that they are in fact (by the same triangulation) the most expensive in terms of land-use, labor and natural resource expenditure. Thus it is more expensive to prepare a simple salad at home with vegetables- more especially if it is organic than it is to visit McDonald or Captain Ds in many cases. Further, for all the nutritive and qualitative differences we may site which are theoretical concerning food choice the reality of such a decision is more problematic. If we are dealing with non-organic produce, it may be argued that the long term effects of eating say - peaches instead of Cheese-burgers may be hard to differentiate. The question you are left with is something like this: Do you want a high risk of cancer, birth defects and a variety of other long term chemical toxin related maladies, or would you prefer instead to deal with obesity and the risk of heart-attack due to exposure to too much meat protein, fat and residual livestock hormones?

Now, when I lived in China, the food I ate there was mainly organic (this is all changing rapidly by the way) and overwhelmingly vegetables and fruits which were ripe when they were harvested and were extremely fresh by our standards- for no better reason than that the food available to me had most often little or no recourse to modern methods of ripening delay and triggering (in warehouse environments), food preservation or scientifically advanced means of cultivation (pesticides, hormones, artificial fertilizers, herbicides, or genetic modification). Some interesting notes about that. These foods were not labeled "organic" or "vine-ripened" or "non-GMO(genetically modified organisms), or "local". They were neither FDA or otherwise, certified or branded as boutique yuppie items, nor were they expensive.

Not only was the flavor and nutrition superior but the distinction was so marked that I as an American was astonished to eat watermelons for example which had so very little white portion to the rind on them that it seemed un-natural to me. Was this a normal watermelon, or are the watermelons in the states "normal"? By comparison- the best watermelons in the US seem paradoxically under-ripe and near rotten all at once. I'm not sure if you can understand my meaning. You know that quality in a melon in which the rind has a lot of that flavorless (or worse, bitter) white rind that extends an inch or so to the center of the fruit? In many cases, the whole melon tastes somewhat like a bitter rind, even where the center has at least something resembling the red color it is known for? On the other end of the scale we all know about melons which are over ripe and loose their fibrous structure, turning into a muddy textured flavorless mush towards the center. American melons quite frequently are characterized prominently by both qualities- that is to say they are both under-ripe and over-ripe. They are both, too young and too old. This is because they were picked too soon and - having been picked and stored, were stored too long- they were never mature. They are the fruit equivalent of human decrepitude diseases in which a ten year old is still short and playful but near death from osteo and organ decrepitude.

Americans don't realize- at least I didn't that a watermelon should perhaps be under-ripe if the farmer is careless, or over-ripe if it sat too long in market but never both. Further, compared to every edible Chinese melon I have ever encountered, every American counterpart if it was edible at all, had by far and away- substantially more of both characteristics at it's most edible point. You'd have to see and eat a Chinese melon to understand how this can be and to know that I am not exaggerating. Chinese melons are - if eaten at the proper time, characterized by hardly any white rind at all and a virtuous, consistent red extending nearly to the very edge of the green outer skin, and throughout with a beautiful, saturated, sweet flavor with a texture both gushing with fluid and firmly fibrous. The peaches, bananas, apples, and tomatoes there - well I could describe their superiority to the very best American fruits similarly. In short- they tasted like food is supposed to taste the way you always hope and expect it too before you are invariably disappointed.

We blame ourselves and our children when we cannot cultivate a love of fruits and vegetables. The truth is though- most of us have not eaten a decent piece of fruit in so long we genuinely lack any notion of what these things actually taste like (when they are even mediocre by old-world standards). I ADORE fruits and vegetables- but all you fruit and vegetable haters out there- the fruit and vegetables you don't like- I don't like them either.

Fear-not (sarcasm alert), our industries have prepared for us many fortified, re-sweetened, re-flavored fruits and vegetables in processed forms - often dried, in cans, or natured into beef products. Further, they will lobby hard to ensure that such products are always the least expensive option for us. And if we become sick due to nutritional or toxic properties, well- we have a treatment for every illness known to man- not a cure perhaps, but a treatment at least. And if the treatments are expensive? We have insurances to rescue us from that. (there's a whole in my bucket, dear Liza dear Liza..)
Personally though, I can't help but be nostalgic for a world with fewer solutions, optimizations, modernizations and enhancements. Sorry, the melons just tasted better before we solved so many problems, and so many problems our solutions caused.