A Photo a Week Challenge: Fresh Fruit
Fresh fruit. I’ve become phobic and afraid of it. So much of it has been genetically modified. It doesn’t look like it used to look.
The big fruit is the orange
Oranges bigger than grapefruit, but the orange skin is half an inch thick and there’s no juice in it. Strawberries the size of plums, mushy and oddly tasteless. Peaches that weigh a pound each, as sweet as cardboard with the same texture.
Those weird fruits also rot pretty much immediately, before a single day passes. So far, they’ve left a few things alone. As far as I can tell, grapefruit and tangerines are still safe. But I won’t buy most fruit except at local farm stands. It’s like consuming an alien invader. Who knows what that stuff will do to you?
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Categories: #Food, #Photography, Photo A Week Challenge
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Nice photos. At least here in Hastings where I live we can see the orchards with their fruits. Living in Austria was a nightmare to get fresh fruit and vegetables. The food would have been picked too early and then spent time on the road before hitting the shops. My children went mad when they saw all the fresh fruit here. On any given day you can drive around Hastings and find that people have small stands with bags of fruit for only a couple of dollars. From their own gardens so you know it is not genetically modified.
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We are surrounded by farms … but in this climate, they are only having crops a couple of months a year. The rest of the time, we depend on imported stuff, from other countries and other parts of this country.
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That is what I found with Austria – such a short limited time to actually grown anything. I really did miss my fruit and veggies.
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That’s the trouble with cold climates. Short growing season, big dependence on warm climate countries to make up the difference.
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And poor quality controls in other countries.
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Lets talk about tomatoes., technically a fruit. Tomatoes have been re-invented with tougher hides to be able to withstand, or is that SURVIVE, the handling of the automatic picking machine. So what about the taste? well, what about it? What do you want.., they look good, color is right and they are strong.., strong enough to be picked by the machine and still look good all the way to market? Heyeee! I say we’ve got a winner here… right?!
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Another fruit we don’t buy except for plum tomatoes which have not changed. Last summer, the mutant grapes and watermelons arrived. For the first time ever I refused to get either fruit. I never thought I’d see a time when I would feel safer eating canned fruit than fresh.
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So glad we grow our own! 🙂
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I wish we could!
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We had fruit trees on our farm when I was a child. Mostly pears and apples. Then there were blackberry bushes, raspberries and fields of strawberries. Plum trees and apricots. I can still remember how all of it tasted. I still remember eating apples and pears right from the tree and the juice was running down my face. Everything tastes different theses days.
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We are eating fake fruit most of the time. Tastes bad, rots quickly. Looks pretty on the shelves though. So maybe it should just stay on the shelves and look pretty.
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“Perfect” comes with a price. I wasn’t aware how much our products are manipulated these days, especially soy, corn and wheat. I started researching it when I got sick and it floored me, it literally floored me when I found out what FDA approved toxins are laying there in our shelves.
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It’s why so many people are so weird about food. I just try not to eat processed food. You can’t entirely avoid it, but as much as I can, I do. Fortunately, we are pretty healthy eaters and not big eaters. And we don’t have a lot of kids in the house.
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I’ve noticed bananas are harder to open these days; the stems don’t break like they used to. I have to cut them open.
I have homegrown strawberries, raspberries and cherry tomatoes. I love cherries from the fruit stands.
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I’ve noticed the bananas are getting weird too. We stopped buying them almost a year ago. It isn’t Cherry season here yet, but I can hardly wait. It lasts just a week or two, but I love cherries!!
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snack time for Godzilla!
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Me too!
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They are doing something to it for sure. I feel the same way. I’m very suspicious.
Leslie
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You have good reason to be suspicious. Even Garry, who isn’t as “into” food as I am, found it hard not to notice that something is wrong with the fruit. That’s it doesn’t look right. And it doesn’t taste good. I can’t imagine NOT noticing.
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I can see making things better, but why the focus on making it worse?
Leslie
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I figure it’s a bottom line thing. It must be cheaper to raise this “modified” fruit. But I think it’s stupid because a lot of people won’t buy it. I don’t think it’s just us. I think a lot of people won’t buy it and won’t eat it. And it tastes like crap, so it’s not a hard choice to make.
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It certainly isn’t worth eating or buying.
Leslie
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And we don’t.
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Unless you read the labels, youll find that almost all bread stuffs, yogurt, icecream, prepared condiments, sports drinks, most soft drinks, most jams and jellies, pre-baked things like cakes, cookies, etc. are all loaded with HFCS. which can mess with your pancreas, your blood sugar, your weight. But your bread will outlive you by several years.
I have become an ingredient reader, since I have low blood sugar and that stuff puts it into a tailspin and my husband has diabetes, the last thing he needs is that stuff.
We even switched back from Margarine to butter, and whole milk. I dont buy designer fruits, at least not the way they look in the stores, or the bocce ball sized tomatoes that have about the same texture. When they hit the floor, they BOUNCE, lol
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I read labels. And we are very careful buyers. I’ve gone from hypoglycemic to pre-diabetic, so I’m very careful. We don’t buy pre-baked stuff. If I want baked goods, I’ll bake them myself, thank you. I buy margarine — can’t handle animal fats, but I read labels on them, too. All margarine is NOT the same, not even close. I’m careful about which cooking oils I use, what drinks we have in the house. So much stuff we used to eat, we don’t go near it any more. But you know, at our age, we’ve already eaten a staggering amount of crap. That our act is pretty clean now? All well and good. But I suspect the damage is long since done.
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I keep my distance from supermarket fruit and veg now, and buy from local producers at the market. It’s a win-win situation – I buy food that hasn’t been treated with chemicals and local producers get my money rather than big companies further afield whose low prices for inedible rubbish force the others out of the market. I do the same for meat.
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I buy locally in season, which, unfortunately, is far too short. By September, the farm stands are closing down except for apples.
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The main thing is that they looks delicious while in the supermarket under their special lighting. Taste, texture and long-term safety are secondary.
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Not for me, so I just have given up buying them. In the summer, we have farm stands. The rest of the year, well, canned goods will have to do the job. Lord knows what’s in that stuff, but at least it doesn’t look weird.
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When I see foods that will stay preserved for several weeks, I cringe. It’s not natural.
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In Israel, bread goes stale in half a day. When I got back here, I kept waiting for it to get stale, to get moldy. It never changed. It was permanent bread. I kept thinking — “What do they put IN this bread?”
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In the winter,when we have the cook stove running, I bake bread. a batch or two a day, until the freezer refuses to take more. With luck it lasts until mid summer. Otherwise I hunt for the few brands of bread that dont have HFCS in them. And now im seeing more and more big name brands getting on the wagon with no HFCS> You vote with your shopping cart.
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It’s lucky we don’t eat much. It makes the whole thing so much easier when you aren’t trying to “feed the troops.”
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We always try to hit farmer’s markets and stands for fresh fruit during the summer. The fruit tastes better.
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Thanks for joining the challenge!
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Thank you for being such a gracious host 🙂
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It must be nice to live in a warmer climate and have that option for a few extra months!
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We have several markets open from June thru September. We really miss them during the winter.
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Being rural, our local fruit and veggie stands are open when the adjacent farm has enough of whatever they grow to sell it to passing motorists … and the time to set up the stand. Typically, there’s no one “manning” these stands, just a coffee can into which you put the money and a scale on which to weigh the goods. The honor system personified. It’s gets a bit tricky if you only have a twenty on you. You either have to buy a LOT of produce, or just give up and leave the whole amount, regardless. We don’t have any fixed markets. It’s catch-as-catch-can.
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What I get afraid of is how accepting we are in all of it. My biggest concern is High Fructose Corn Syrup–it’s manufactured from genetically altered corn, irradiated TWICE and then turned into a cheap miracle ingredient in almosf everything we consume. Scary stuff.
I agree, fruit has also taken on a bizarre look here, too; some of it is hybridization, but a lot is, as you say, genetically altered. Fake (hybrid) blueberries have been around for decades, as have fake (hybrid) strawberries, but they are both getting larger and larger and more and more worthless.
The other thing that concerns me is bananas. Remember how we’d buy a bunch of ripe-on-the-ouside bananas and wait what seemed like DAYS before they were ripe inside? I now buy the greenest I can find and watch them ripen up in front of me. Still with green skins, but ripe and edible.
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I don’t buy much fruit any more for exactly that reason. Now, all the peaches and plums are disgusting. I miss fruit, but I won’t eat that stuff.
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Fruit and veg do seem to go off faster than they used to. I like to buy it from local producers when I can. It isn’t always possible for me to get to the growers but as we live in an apple growing district I totally refuse to buy apples from the big chains. The local supermarket sells locally grown apples so I will buy theirs but I like buying from stalls and markets best. Also that way I know the money will stay local.
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That quick rotting is one of the symptoms of the meddling they’ve done. Berries that rot in hours, not days. Huge seedless melons that rot from the inside out. Peaches that look great, but never ripen and always taste like … cardboard? We live in apple country too. Orchards all over the valley and when we can, we go pick our own. But that’s only a couple of months of the year and we aren’t always organized enough to go find farm stands. Our local grocery advertises locally grown produce. They tell you which town and sometimes, which farm. Mixed in with the good stuff is the OTHER stuff. I might not mind all of this nearly as much if the fruit they produced was, at least, tasty. But it isn’t.
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