Mutant Fruit

There is never a dull moment at my job. No matter who I am with no matter where I am I can find something to talk about with anyone. Before I continue let me just make this disclaim, I am in no way a naturalist or purist or whatever the word is for eating only organic foods. But sometimes I wonder if that isn't a good idea to look into.

So back to the talking to anyone thing. I was chatting with one of the Juvenile Court Officers that I work with today, and believe it or not we started talking about a case but it quickly deteriorated into other topics completely unrelated to work. One of them was the topic of mutant fruit, at this point I can't remember how it got started but it was a fairly entertaining conversation.

We were discussing the fact that now when you go to the grocery story some things have become almost unrecognizable. In a recent visit to the store I thought I would buy some strawberries and as I searched through the packages for one that looked "good" I noticed that some of them only had like 5 strawberries in a pound box. These strawberries were a pale shade of red, hard as a rock, and easily the size of ping pong ball. Now I don't know about the rest of you but when my mom had a strawberry patch the strawberries we got NEVER looked like that. They were, on average, the size of a large marble, were a deep shade of red, and were juicy and full of flavor.

So I just have to ask, what the hell happened? And it's not just strawberries. Bananas, apples, oranges (have you seen those lately they are larger than a softball), cucumbers, tomatos, I could go on and on. Everywhere you look in the produce department things have gotten larger, more pale, and less flavorful. When did this change occur, when did we decide that size mattered more than flavor? Produce has been sprayed with growth hormones, to get bigger, then picked early so they don't rot on the way to the store, and then sprayed again to "ripen" them up so they look pretty on the shelf. Basically what we have ended up with is some mutant form of the fruits and vegetables we once knew and loved.

I don't know if at this point we can ever go back, we have become all to accustomed to this over sized produce and probably for the most part don't even realize we are missing out on any flavor. However that being said it makes me think that next year I will be hitting the farmer's market hard. I don't care if it's a little deformed or I have to eat 10 strawberries rather than 5 to get my fill, as long as it's fresh and flavorful.

I will leave you with this closing thought. The juvenile court officer suggested this course of action the next time you are in the store. Pick up one of these mutant fruits, find one of the employess and ask them "what the hell is this?" If nothing else you may get some entertainment out of their reaction.