By Maria Millers
Sitting on my kitchen table is a bowl of peaches and nectarines bought a few days before: round plush peaches with their velvety skin and the sleek and the smooth burnished nectarines, perfect and unblemished. Beautiful to look at like some Still Life painting, but stone hard and nowhere near ready to eat.
Time and time again the perfect looking fruit we buy unblemished and uniformly shaped and sized as if off a precision production line fails to deliver the juicy, fragrant qualities of stone fruit.
Nor is there a guarantee that the fruit as it ripens will not become a mealy, inedible mush.
So what has happened to peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums and mangoes?
Where is the flavour and aroma we used to associate with these fruits?
Over the last several decades the focus has been on colour, size, and presentation, and indeed the fruit appears so perfectly uniform and so visually attractive, sitting in my fruit bowl as I wait for it to ripen.
Some readers may remember weekend car trips into the countryside and stopping at orchards with roadside stalls selling fruit; and the pleasure of sinking your teeth into a freshly picked fragrant peach, nectarine, cherry or apricot. Today many young people have never had the taste experience of a sun ripened fruit grown locally but settle for a perfect looking fruit yet one short on sweetness and flavour.
Because stone fruit can be deeply symbolic, representing the celebration of nature, summer, pleasure, but also impermanence, it’s often the subject for artists through the ages from Still Life paintings to poetry.
American poet Dorianne Laux’s Peach, is a sensual poem that captures the tactile beauty and fleeting nature of the fruit. Here’s an excerpt:
I bite into the peach, its juice
running down my chin like a child’s face
licked clean by a mother’s hand. The fruit
is warm and thick with sun, a softness
I carry in my mouth.
Sadly the poem does not reflect the experience of many today.
Stone fruits have always been part of our Christmas celebrations.
The trend has long been of moving away from the heavy traditional Xmas dinner of turkey and pudding to one more suited to our climate and season.
Seafood is now often replacing the turkey and instead of rich dried fruit based puddings we are turning to lighter desserts such as pavlovas, fruit salads and fresh fruit trifles. Integral to these is of course fresh fruit.
A bowl of cherries can be a great way to contribute to a Christmas meal or as a gift.
The cherry season is only 100 days long and DH Lawrence’s poem reminds us of the sensual beauty of cherries, and the fleeting nature of the fruit.
The poem invites readers to embrace the beauty and sensuality of the present, knowing that, like the cherries, the perfect moments of life are brief but precious.
Excerpt from Cherries
I like the way cherries look
In the darkness, small, round,
Suspended in a gold bowl
Like drops of red blood,
Like tiny jewels of love
The scent of ripe mangoes, with their tropical sweetness has been a hallmark of the Australian summer.
In Mangoes David Campbell captures the lush, tropical allure of the fruit.
Excerpt from Mangoes
The mangoes glow in the twilight sun,
Their sweetness fills the air,
And the soft flesh drips down my chin.
Perhaps we should all take responsibility for the way the flavour of fruit has been degraded as we tend to choose fruit on appearance above all else.
Many fruits today are bred for qualities other than flavour and sweetness such as shelf life, and resistance to disease.
So some varieties of fruits may look perfect but lack the robust flavours that older, traditional varieties offered.
Fruits are picked before they are fully ripe to extend their shelf life and make them easier to transport in refrigerated vehicles which slows the ripening process and affects their taste and some are even treated with chemicals to stop premature ripening.
Walk into the highly temperature controlled environments of any supermarket and you will no longer be greeted with the heady aromas of summer fruits.
In the past, most fruit was grown and sold locally, meaning it could ripen naturally and reach consumers at its peak flavour.
The orchards that used to fringe Melbourne are mostly long gone and with the rise of global food systems, many fruits are grown far from where they are consumed and may not reach their full flavour potential before they arrive at the market.
Despite our obsession with the appearance of fruit yet in Still Life paintings fruit often appears less than perfect.
In Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit(1599), one of the earliest examples of Still Life, ripening fruit is shown with all its blemishes: ‘worm eaten, insect predated and generally less than perfect’ that could among other things symbolize the fleeting nature of life.
Many other artists from Cezanne to our own Margaret Olley have followed in a similar vein.
Sourcing fruit that is ripened naturally and grown with flavour and nutrition in mind can be difficult for most people who rely on supermarkets.
Perhaps we should start voicing our concerns and preferences for the qualities we look for in the fruit we want to eat.
I’m still hopeful that the fruit in my bowl will ripen to their natural sweetness but I’m not sure.
William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
