Some of you might recall my experience with earwigs inside a peach and mold inside an apple and the bloody, black soul I found inside a banana… My saga continues with the manky, moldy, mildewed, malodorous COCONUT. Yes, those are colonies of mold growing in the shell and on the flesh, which is meant to be white. And, yes, it smells bad ~ my husband wouldn’t let it stay in the house.

I also want to mention that there is something wrong with some organic foods. Three times I have bought organic avocados which look great on the outside, but are weirdly stringy and discoloured on the inside. And, worse, they are tasteless! I’ve never experienced a “watery”-tasting avocado until I started buying them in the organic store. Also, bananas. I won’t buy organic ones anymore because they are strange inside. Their molecules are different; they don’t hold together the same way  ~ they separate length-wise when you are just trying to peel them. And they brown strangely. We have bought green organic bananas and, a few days later, they are still mostly green but practically liquid inside. Ew. I don’t get it. Is it because our food is so processed and chemicalized that I don’t even recognize the real thing anymore? And why are Red Delicious apples mealy, Granny Smiths give me a stomach ache, Mackintoshes are gorgeous to look at, but have no flavour, and Fujis are consistently crisp, sweat and tart? And where did all the gnarly crab apples go? And cooking apples? Did you know, when I was a kid in Ireland, we got apples, tangerines and nuts in our trick-or-treat bags?

Maybe the business of “organic” and the labeling laws are a bit of a scam… Maybe the bigger issue is loss of diversification in our crops (remember the famine?) and consumers’ changing ideals of what our foods should look like and… Monsanto. I kind of want to launch into a huge diatribe about losing our fruit and vegetable varieties and the importance of seed preservation and how necessary it is for us to spend our money on the unknown, under-appreciated, ugly foods and not be sucked in by the pretty, homogeneous GMO products… But, I’ll spare you.

I’m grateful for vegetable gardens. Assuming we can have access to heirloom seeds. And climate change doesn’t destroy everything. 🙂