I had slowly been forming the opinion that our fresh fruit and vegetables were changing over the years. You know how you remember when you sat in the apricot tree eating the soft, warm sweet apricots. And the warnings from adults that eating warm fruit will make you ill. And the ignoring of the warnings . . .
I couldn't understand how it was that the breeders of fruit varieties could just not manage what the breeders of our vegetables seemed to be doing so effortlessly.
Think how the sweetcorn of today differ from the sweetcorn of forty years ago. Think of the cucumbers; and the tomatoes; make your own list. None are worse; almost all are improved.
About the fruit: Could my tastes have changed in fruit and not in vegetables? The only apples you can buy are green, sour and hard; yellow, sour and hard; red, sour and hard. Bananas are obviously picked green and put in storage. They end up tasteless apart from a bitter aftertaste. Japanese kaki (the original fruit of the gods when soft and ripe) now don't get soft (soft isn't good for transporting) so they never develop the rich sweet aromatic taste. Grapes are good for looking at - but horrible to eat. What we used to call hanepoot is now unobtainable.
But I have been barking up the wrong tree all along - it is not the new varieties that I should blame. The agriculturists are doing fine. It is market forces. From what I see in overseas fresh food markets the answer is simple. In South Africa we don't export much in the vegetable line - not in the quantities of our fruit. So it appears to me that we are selling our best fruit overseas, leaving the leavings for our shops. And I am voting with my feet. I will eat the good South African fruit overseas when I get the chance, and stick to vegetables when at home.
