Homely Produce

At our supermarkets, we are accustomed to seeing aisle upon aisle of shiny unblemished fruits and vegetables.  Deep green broccoli - with stalks, crowns only or mixed in with a bag of salad.  It's always attractive, so easy to be smitten by, bagged and put in my cart.  The downside is it doesn't taste like anything.  Tomatoes?  They come in many varieties, they too are beautiful, glossy red - and tasteless.  Bananas, shipped 8,000 miles are looking good but equally as disappointing when it's time to take a bite.

The produce here is often quite ugly.  The one available variety of tomato is dull red with green mottling.  They are delicious.  I'm not a big tomato fan but I'm putting them in sandwiches, salads and spaghetti sauce.  The bananas look spotted, scabby and a colour that is not quite yellow.  They are SO good!  Everything we've sampled in the fruit and vegetable world here tells the same story.  Ugly but delicious.

I know we've got to ship food half way around the world to fill our supermarket shelves.  There must be some nutrition in the produce; I've not read of many cases of scurvy or rickets in our cities.  It's only when you get somewhere where produce is grown locally and picked when ripe that you can appreciate what pap we consume regularly at home.  The produce here is just better.

They've not figured out how to genetically alter their hens here to produce extra large eggs that have no taste.  The eggs look like something a normal hen could deliver, not a behemoth the poor creature would require a caesarian to produce.  But, the eggs here have yellow yolks and taste like an egg.

There is a downside I'm sure.  Maybe it's the beef.  Other than ground beef there isn't any in the local mercados.  Beef requires a trip to the butcher who is out of my bike range.  That is likely just as well since it would likely have me producing yet another tiresome diatribe on how good the food is here.

Don't get me started on the fish...