Food Choices and Cherimoyas

I've been trying out unusual food items from the store lately - unusual to me, anyway.  I set up a few rules for myself based on my own ethics (low carbon footprint, if possible; organic; produced by an independent farmer or manufacturer) and then see what I can find.  

Last week, I tried a cherimoya for the first time, produced on a farm in Santa Barbara.  It has the exact same color as a raw artichoke, is shaped like a pointed globe and has curious segments on the outside that look like a finger has smoothed the skin of the fruit one stroke at a time.  Inside, the fruit has a soft creamy color and texture like a papaya or mango.  The flavor is very delicate, sweet and fragrant; maybe an odd cross between a very mild strawberry and a pineapple.  There is an interesting array of large seeds inside, kind of like apple seeds on steroids, that are not edible.

You cut the fruit from top to bottom in half and lay it open.  The seeds are immediately visible and must be scooped out one by one with a spoon.  A grapefruit spoon would be good to use if you had one.  Scooping out the flesh like you would from an avocado, you remove it from the tough green skin discarding the skin and seeds.

We sampled the fruity soft inside with some fresh pineapple, but it would also be good with several other fruits that have a slightly more acid note.  Strawberries, kiwi, berries.  With practice you could develop some finesse about scooping the fruit out and preserving some form, but ours was a little messy.  Fun to try it out; a new choice to add to the list for spring fruit.

This brings us to what are called heirloom fruits.  For a long span of time - 40-50 years - farmers were interested in finding varieties of apples, strawberries, peaches, plums and so on that could survive shipping from one side of the globe to the other, and that quality became a determining factor in selecting hybrids for planting.

When you grow your own strawberries at home, you end up with much smaller, redder, juicier and much more intensely flavored berries than you find at Safeway or Food Mart.  I've heard people say when they taste their own fruit for the first time, "Wow, is that really an apple?  It's so different."

Heirloom fruits are those that have been kept in gardens and grafted or propagated by home gardeners or very small farms.  They are the same fruits that our forebears ate, one of the few things we have in living form that we can experience just as they did.  Through natural selection, grafting and cross pollination, new varieties were developed, a form of genetic manipulation that favored color and flavor.

Recently, corporate farmers are become increasintly interested in finding varieties of apples, strawberries, peaches, plums and so on that could survive shipping from one side of the globe to the other, and that quality became a determining factor in selecting hybrids for planting.

These days, due to manipulation of the very genes of the plants - genetic engineering - gene splicing is being done in a way that allows for far less variability in the resulting plant.  As a matter of fact, cloning is much more prevalent than anything else.  Breeds of plants are developed in labs.  Durability, growing time and cost are determining factors in breed selection.

So, oftentimes, you see a huge field of exactly the same plant x one million, in the case of a big field of spinach or lettuce over in the Salinas Valley or in California's Central Valley.  They are essentially desertlands of only one genetic package.  There's no chance for variation or adaptability in the plant.

So what?

Genetic manufacturing companies want to create the highest degree of sameness and predictability with our foods.  Predictable span of time from farm to table with the least amount of spoilage.  If the food happens to taste like an apple, great.  If not, and it just looks like an apple, that's okay too.

I'm personally not interested in eating an apple that looks like two or three million other apples.  I want to eat an apple grown in real soil that's not fumigated and gassed with poisons.  I'm willing not to eat an apple at all if it's not able to be grown within a hundred-mile distance of my home.

There is a whole lot more about genetic modification and cloning that leaves me cold.  I am able to make a choice for small farms, small markets, genetic variability and resilience based on that.  We have given up a lot by choosing sameness, shelf life over variety.  The choice has to be thought through and made with some focus on the long-term effects of our farming practices.  It's wonderful that we can make a choice, especially in California.  My learning process is ongoing.  Just think how much was prompted by one funny-looking fruit at our local store:  a little cherimoya.