Disfrutando de las Frutas

20^th July 2023

There was always a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table when I was a child. I Sometimes, it’s contents vividly indicated our financial situation: if it was full of bananas, grapes, strawberries and mandarin oranges times were good, if it contained only small russet apples, or some plums, sent from family in the country, times were tough. Fruit was a bit luxurious, a bit special. The posh stuff came in tins.

My mother and father were born during the Great Depression, and they were small children during World War II. They told us kids that they did not see bananas until they were nine years old, and when they did, their families could not afford to buy them. Great hands of bananas were bought for me and my brother, yet I never considered their significance to my parents until now.

My fascination with all things food-focussed began at an early age, watching my grandfather’s small vegetable garden come to life, or helping my grandmother bake her beautiful teacakes and scones, measuring out exotic-smelling dried fruits and spices. I was captivated by the gardens of our immigrant neighbours in Australia, those Greeks and Italians who surrounded my childhood home in Sydney. I recall tasting passionfruit, sweetcorn and watermelon for the first time, and tiny sweet tomatoes, warm from the vine; passed over the fence by cheerful neighbours, or acquired through judicious lunch-box swapsies at school. I was adept at trading my breaktime biscuits for a spanakopita or baklava. Long impossibly humid evenings, sitting on our little verandah with my granny, eating chunks of bitter Lebanese cucumber dipped in salt are an abiding summer memory, and over the years I have come to associate my family with fruits and vegetables.

My grandfather will always be cabbage and potatoes. I loved helping him to dig, breaking up clods of soil with a fork, picking off the snails and caterpillars from the greens, chucking them on the compost. I never saw him kill them, or spray them with chemicals. My granny will forever be cucumbers and pears. When I cut into a pear, I imagine the sweetness of her smile. My mother will always be plums and peaches. Her pale blue eyes would light up when she bit into one. There was a peach tree in our garden in Sydney, and I would climb it, dropping down the prizes. My father is green apples. I liked to watch how he pared off slices and ate them with a small sharp knife. He would always hold out a piece for me. I still like to eat apples this way. My favourite uncle is red apples. I remember walking through an old orchard with him when I was about eleven, while he explained the technique of grafting new stock onto old root stock, showed me elderly trees, trees grown from cuttings that had travelled all the way from America in an ancestor’s pack. My eccentric, glamorous godmother is tomatoes; she grew them by the ton in her tiny greenhouse. Ate them like sweets. She also hid bottles of brandy and vodka in the potting compost, but that’s another story! My brother is strawberries. He always loved strawberry-flavoured things when we were kids: ice-cream, milk, lollies. Yet he was allergic to the fruit, and would break out in hives if he ate one. Me? I think I might be raspberries. They’re my favourite, and their season is a short, sweet one. I like the short and sweet events in life. I’m not one to drag things out for the sake of it.

As my summer garden magically produces fruit and vegetables, and I pick them after early-morning watering, it’s easy to forget the labour that goes into their creation, the bees and insects who pollinate them. It’s only when I perform in the additional chore of preparing and cooking them that I truly appreciate the wonder of growing food, glorious food! The colours, the scents, the flavours. No “ready-meal” or “fast-food” can compare to a tomato straight from the vine, sliced transparently thin with a well-honed knife, laid on buttered toast, dressed with salt and pepper, and maybe a spoonful of olive oil; or a plate of shredded, fried cabbage and onions, piled on mashed potatoes laced with dods of cold salty butter and white pepper. The eggs I collect from our four lovely ladies are “hen fruit!” I cracked a double-yolker into the pan last week. Pure joy. A slice of fried bread, plenty sea salt, and I enjoyed five minutes of paradise. Sticking a palid imitation of lasagne into a microwave and waiting for the “ding” just ain’t the same! Now the high heid yins are telling us that or future food will be grown in labs – no more smelly animals, clucking squawking birds dropping their eggs everywhere, no more shovelling their poo onto foetid compost heaps, no more digging and planting. Not good for us or for the planet, apparently.