Banks Peninsula
Why odd-looking fruit and veges don’t faze Clare Goodwin.
My friend Liz and I met for a coffee and found ourselves swapping photos of our best fruit – I don’t even know what her grandchildren look like. I think all my tomatoes are beautiful, but others have called them ugly. I love the way that every one is different.
Tomatoes are just a joy. Beautiful heritage varieties with names that sing – ‘Aunt Ruby’s German Green’, ‘Olga’s Round Chicken Egg’ (who are these people?), ‘Coeur de Bue’, ‘Trifele’ – and colours ranging from deep yellow to mahogany and green. There is a gorgeous book in our local library with glossy photos of the most beautiful specimens in the US. There are so many! And so many different shapes and sizes and colours, all in one species.
So why do we still see those “perfect” specimens in the shops?
Apples, all the same, shiny and round. Tomatoes, all the same colour, size and shape. It certainly doesn’t make them taste good. Is this what customers really want or have we just been conditioned to think that this is how it should be.
Maybe it’s because we don’t like surprises. You know what you are getting, like when you go to a fast food place. No-one likes little green wriggly surprises in their food (although a customer once said she liked finding insects in her greens because it reminded her that it was grown naturally. Water usually does the trick to get rid of them.)
Produce can be transported for hundreds of kilometres before it gets to the shelves, sometimes even thousands when it comes from overseas. We have got used to eating what we want when we want, and people are sometimes horrified at the price of a cauliflower, without any idea what has gone into growing, transporting, storing and selling it.
Everyone needs to be paid, including the grower. It is not a high-paying industry. If something is too expensive, it can mean that it is out of season or that it has been a bad season, so it could be seen as a luxury item for this moment in time.
It would be difficult to transport and handle heritage variety tomatoes if they were ripe, so some big growers will grow varieties that are selected for being robust enough to transport well, rather than for flavour, and harvest way before they are ripe so they arrive on shop shelves looking red and round and shiny and ready to go.
Smaller growers and home gardeners will more often grow varieties that are not always so prolific and don’t keep as well as produce you can buy in the supermarket – but they look and taste amazing. So if you haven’t got a garden and your neighbours aren’t forcing you to take their surplus, a good place to find good, interesting and delicious produce is at a farmers market. Growers will often happily talk about their wares too, because they feel passionate about what they grow.
In autumn, we were all desperately trying to fob off our excess produce on to neighbours.
So many courgettes, pears, apples, quinces… can’t complain though eh? What a luxury. But you need to be in quick to get rid of yours before someone offers theirs!
I wish there was an easy way of sharing. There are many people in town who don’t have enough and we all have too much, but only so much energy to harvest.
There’s a lot of preserving that goes on in these parts too. Jars and freezers full of grated courgettes, stewed apples, pumpkin soup, chutneys – just to name a few. Hard work but worth it in winter and spring when we are craving veges and fruit.
For the last few years, I have been growing gem squash.
They are, come to think of it, perfectly round, uniform green and store really well, but that’s just how they are. The plants are prolific and there’s too much for us, but no-one seems to know about them or they are seen as too much like courgettes which are similarly prolific at around the same time.
They are definitely not as glamorous as tomatoes. How could they be? But they are delicious steamed whole (top cut off and replaced so they don’t explode) with loads of butter mixed into the creamy flesh when they are cooked. I’m going to try and grow a strange shaped one next time. ✤