Читать книгу The New English Kitchen: Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat - Rose Prince - Страница 174

Oranges and bananas, mangoes and papayas – I cannot do without them, and rely on a supply to cheer up fruit bowls when the English apples and pears have all been eaten, the berry season is over and soft orchard fruits are a memory in a pickle jar to eat with cold Monday leftover meat. I have travelled to Tobago twice and eaten so-called exotic fruits in their home – ripened in the sun and not in the hold of a ship – and was cheered to find that although they tasted better, it was only marginally so.

These fruits are made for travel. They ripen without sunlight in the dark, in our cold shops and quickly on our radiators. The gentle fingers that pack them in boxes in the Caribbean and Africa do so knowing how easily bananas bruise. I once asked a banana trader in London’s Nine Elms wholesale market why Caribbean bananas are small and curled and South American bananas long and straight. It was a conversation that has always stayed with me. ‘Ah, that is because there is less investment in the banana plantations of the Caribbean,’ he said, ‘and the bananas are picked before they grow to their full size.’ It was 1999 and we were talking about the World Trade Organisation’s decision to apply levies on certain European ‘luxury’ goods to the US, in retaliation for European loyalty to the Caribbean banana market over the largely American-owned plantations in South America/Costa Rica. ‘The Caribbean bananas,’ the trader continued, ‘are picked early because the farmers cannot afford to leave them on the trees even for another week. To me,’ he added, ‘they always look like small, hungry hands.’

This is an analogy of a worldwide problem for food producers. Lack of investment is the enemy of small food production. Along with coffee, tea, chocolate and dried fruits, Fairtrade bananas are now in most supermarkets. They are still small and curled but I am watching with hope.