I was poking around in the warehouse at Sac Valley Box one day in search of wooden boxes to pack pomegranates in when I came across a pile of foam rubber sheets with tiny dimples in them. The old guy who runs the place explained to me that they were for shipping cherries to Japan. Each cherry is wrapped in a little square of tissue paper, and then set into its foam rubber nest for the voyage.
That a cherry would be individually wrapped, and individually sold (at an extortionate price), seems extreme, and yet it shows an appealing sensitivity and respect. This is fruit not to be gobbled by the handful but to be placed in a special bowl on a special table and to be studied and appreciated and admired and contemplated before, finally, being tasted. Those of us who find ourselves needing to pick another thousand pounds before sundown cannot give each cherry the attention it deserves. We like to think that our customers can take that time.
But there is another side to Japanese fruit marketing. That is the idea that every piece of fruit must be perfect— unblemished and symmetrical. Each cherry must be the archetypal cherry, every plum the archetypal plum. Friends of mine who export produce to Japan are driven crazy by the requirement that each vegetable or piece of fruit conform to a precise standard. I find this an intolerant view of the world, rather like the view that every young woman must look like, let us say, Barbie. I wouldn’t want every young woman to look like Barbie (even one might be too many); a beaky nose, a gap between the front teeth, asymmetrical eyebrows, become charms and endearments when they pertain to your friends.
I once visited a packing shed in California where potatoes were being sorted. If you have ever grown potatoes, you will know that they are full of notions. This one has a furrowed brow, that one is subject to depressions, and then you’ll find a whole group that have decorated themselves with bumps and knobs. The packers were recognizing five grades: culls; number two; number one; potatoes for the military (which were a slightly higher grade than number ones); and finally, the apex, the acme, the Miss America of the potatoes, which were labeled “pommes de terre” and wrapped in purple tissue, for sale to restaurants. The entrance requirement for becoming a pomme de terre was pure conformity to the archetype, not a whiff of individuality.
At the market once, I was apologizing to my customer, a young woman, about the crookedness of some snapdragons. She shrugged, and said in a heavy Italian accent, “Crooked is good, crooked is good.” If I were a single man looking for a wife, there’s a woman I could court.
This week I’ve been harvesting eggplant. We grow a variety called “Minifinger” (a slender, shiny black fruit with a green calyx, about the size of a banana), and another one called “Millionaire” (which is similar except that it doesn’t take the heat as well and the calyx is purple), and a neon-pink version of these called “Ping Tung.” I notice when I’m harvesting that there’s always a bit of tension, a bit of conflict, between the aesthetic attraction of a box of perfect and uniform eggplants and the view that there is virtue in all of them, that a profusion of shapes and sizes is appealing.
As it turns out, I harvest nearly all of them, which I think shows me to be a good Democrat. In the market there will be some customers with rigid notions about eggplant who subject themselves to a lifetime of disappointment by their conviction that only one in a hundred is perfect enough. These are compensated for by other customers who think that crooked is good. In the end, all of the eggplant is sold.
Pinterest
