The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [31]
Out of the blue, one of them said that I was crazy. I quoted from Hamlet with Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” but the chemical people were apparently fearful of the lawsuits that would follow upon my death from ingesting their ingestion-grade chemicals. I offered to sign a piece of paper guaranteeing that I would not eat anything they sold me. This trick has worked for me in the past, but not this time.
So I promised to test all concoctions only on my puppy. (I don’t have a puppy.) Until then, these two employees had been heavy lidded and lethargic. But the mention of a puppy brought them to life, making them unaccountably but vividly angry. I was about to quote from Horace, “Ira furor brevis est” (“Anger is a passing madness”), when they threw me out of their shabby quarters. Threw me out!
From a telephone on the corner I called my wife for moral support, got some, then walked over to my local pharmacist, who was happy to help. We pored over his chemical catalog and ordered sixteen mineral salts. The first step was to dilute each of these to a few parts per million, the equivalent of a minuscule pinch in a bathtub of distilled water. Lacking that much distilled water and that many bathtubs, I dissolved a half teaspoon of each salt in a quart of water, took a half teaspoon of that solution, and mixed it into a fresh quart of water. Voilà, seven parts per million, ready for blending and tasting.
Somewhere among my sixteen bottles, jars, vases, and pitchers of water flows my pristine Alpine spring. When I discover where it is, I will let you know. Until then, some bottled waters come extremely close: Naya, Volvic, Connoisseur, Bourassa, Quibell, Fiuggi, Lora, Poland Spring, St. Michel, St. Jean, and Clairval.
May 1991
Ripeness Is All
Ripe fruit wants to be eaten. It has no other function, makes no other contribution. It does not produce sugar to nourish the rest of the plant, as the leaves do. It does not search for water and collect minerals like the roots or distribute nutrients like the stem. A fruit’s only purpose is to seduce animals like you and me into becoming cheerful dupes in its secret reproductive agenda.
The dream of every plant is to propagate its own genes and species. For most, this means spreading their seeds far from the mother tree or bush so that the offspring will not compete with its parents for water, breathing space, and sunlight. Every seed has its own means of transportation, papery wings or balls of fluff that ride the wind, or burs that hook onto your jeans or fur. Fruits have another way. As spring draws into summer, they become plump and juicy and brilliantly colored, sweet and perfumed and irresistible.
At least that is what nature had in mind. Yet last summer I hardly dared to eat a Prunus persica, and this year’s portents are even worse; I doubt that travelers would have brought today’s supermarket peaches from China to Persia to Europe in the first place. Peaches and melons and pineapples—most fruit, in fact—do not get any sweeter or more flavorful after they are picked from the tree, vine, bramble, or bush (though they may improve in texture or color). Yet most of American agriculture, even some farmers at my local green market, seem determined to harvest fruit earlier and greener every year. And there are no laws ensuring that those little “Vine Ripened” stickers on the most expensive produce at your store mean anything at all. The penalty for pasting a sticker on a hard, tasteless piece of fruit should be the same as the penalty for printing counterfeit ten-dollar bills.
Eternal vigilance is the price of ripeness. Make it a habit to return unripe fruit. Throw a scene if need be. Your message may reach the wholesaler or the grower. For the smallest fruit, here’s a handy tip: When nobody is looking, remove a berry from its little basket and conceal it in your palm. With your other hand, quickly wheel your shopping cart into a dark corner of, say, the cheese department and pop the berry into your mouth. Chew. Appraise