The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [37]
But don’t seal the plastic bag tight, or the fruit will ferment and mold.
Before a fruit is ripe, refrigerator temperature will retard the process, may turn the sweeter sugars into glucose, can permanently deactivate the softening powers of polygalacturonase, and may increase acidity. Given enough time, chilling will injure fruits of tropical and semitropical origin both before and after ripening. Avoid buying very cold fruit in the grocery store. Not only will you be unable to evaluate its aroma, but chilling injuries (such as the mushy, fibrous flesh of a damaged peach) may not become apparent until the fruit returns to room temperature.
20. Is all this supposed to explain why most fruit in American supermarkets, except maybe cherries, is so awful?
Partly. There are other reasons too. Until recently, fruit breeders concentrated only on size, color, firmness, and supernaturally uniform shape, at the expense of flavor, sweetness, and texture. Some growers demand trees on which all the fruit matures at once, making it easier to harvest by machine. Others overfertilize to increase their yield and overirrigate to increase the fruits’ weight shortly before harvest. And some years the weather refuses to cooperate. But ripeness is, to paraphrase the poet, the biggest deal of all.
There are four villains in the ripeness story: the greedy grower, the venal wholesaler, the shortsighted retailer, and the ignorant and stingy consumer like you and me.
To save on labor costs, growers use machines to pick, sort, and pack their fruit. Ripe fruit cannot survive a run-in with these machines. And when mechanical harvesters are used, they pick everything in sight—hard green, barely mature, and nearly ripe. Growers know that early fruit commands a higher price; all growers would like to recover their investment as soon in the season as possible; and most would like to sell whatever has not ripened by season’s end. Citrus growers pick early when they fear a frost.
Growers complain that fruit brokers and retailers make them compete on the basis of price alone, not with texture or flavor. Brokers contend that retailers refuse to accept delivery of produce too ripe to have a long and happy shelf life. Retailers say that brokers buy only the easiest fruit to handle; they blame consumers for their unwillingness to pay more for more delicious fruit. The magic of the marketplace has somehow failed us when inferior fruit forces out produce of higher quality.
But some rays of hope do flicker through the darkening clouds of American fructiculture. Take Ron Mansfield. He is a grower in El Dorado County, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, where he farms several small parcels, leaving his peaches and nectarines on the trees until three or four days before they would drop of their own accord; his tree-ripened peaches have at least twice the sugar of those picked just at physical maturity and ripened off the tree. Mansfield picks and packs them by hand in single-layer wooden boxes, and two days later they are offered at fancy produce stores and restaurants on both coasts (and at his own retail farm stand). Mansfield knows only three or four other California growers who try to ship fruit of equal quality.
Margaret and Bill Skaife of Oceanside, California, near San Diego, have designed hand-harvesting and packing procedures and clever containers (patent pending) for shipping nearly ripe tomatoes, strawberries, and stone fruit to distant markets. (The fruits are suspended by their stems and cushioned from swinging against their neighbors.) Their first tomato crop, offered to consumers with a gold sticker and a money-back guarantee, was a great success at stores like Balducci’s in New York, which sold two thousand pounds of them during peak weeks.