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Yet another case of disappointing fruit?

3 min read

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In the basement refrigerator waits a watermelon, purchased out of season and against my better judgment. I’m hoping that by giving it a bit more time, the melon will transform into something edible.

If it doesn’t – if I slice into it to find pale pink bitterness or mushy nothingness – it will be yet another case of disappointing fruit.

In the past month, I’ve brought home plenty of disappointing fruit: mealy apples, tasteless bananas, rancid blueberries and cartons of strawberries with all the soft ones hidden in the middle. When a store is offering large pineapples for $1.99 each, beware. That pineapple will sit on your counter for weeks and never give up its spiky leaves; by the time you grow tired of waiting and slice into the fruit, it will be brown, having gone overripe without telling you so.

Fruit hasn’t always been this frustrating. Melons were always as reliable as, say, a box of macaroni and cheese. You could look at the outside and predict what would be inside, and how it would taste.

Maybe the stores are rushing things to increase profits. Is there anything more enticing in the dreary days of early May than a big farm bin full of watermelons greeting you at the supermarket? By now we all know how to pick a good one: look for dark green skin and a big, flat yellow spot on the bottom. Last spring I bought two that looked like that, and both were sour and gritty. I should have known better.

Even the apples have become less predictable. My apple-a-day has long been a Fuji – crispy but not too crispy, and mildly sweet. I winnowed my preference to that, having tried and rejected Granny Smiths as too sour, Rome and Macintosh as having flimsy skin, and the shiny imposter Red Delicious as being all looks and no character.

The texture of the last Fuji apples I bought was something more in the plum family. And don’t get me started on the fickleness of plums.

“How can there be a bad banana?” I asked the farmer recently. I’d bought a big bunch of them at a discount store. While yellow and large on the outside, the insides were tasteless. And too skinny for their peels, like skinny astronauts in yellow moon suits.

“Agri-business,” said the farmer. “They modify the fruit to make it more sturdy, and then it ends up tasting so bad even the bugs won’t eat it.”

That’s about as good an explanation as any.

We’re coming up on farmers market season, and we’ll be able to buy produce that doesn’t make us mad. And there’s always the home garden. Ours will be much smaller this year, and it won’t have tomatoes at all, because we can’t keep the deer away from it. Our resident deer family ate all of last year’s tomato crop, and I promise you they were not disappointed with the flavor. Home gardens and local farms are the hedge against fickle store-bought fruit.

I’ve been keeping an eye on our watermelon, opening the basement fridge every day or so to see how it’s coming along. It’s futile, of course. Watermelons don’t ripen to brown like bananas, and they don’t get soft bottoms and loose leaves as pineapples are supposed to do.

Watermelons just sit there acting all green and delicious, but who knows what disappointment lurks inside.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.

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