Andrew Kay: Fruits of the forest

I’m eating an apple. It’s a big yellow thing, speckled with moss green and as crisp as a… well as crisp as one might hope an apple would be. I was given it, and a whole lot more, when visiting a friend who lives out of town and has a garden full of apple trees. I’m not sure the number of trees would officially qualify it for the title orchard, but it must be close. Anyhoo, this year, it would seem, has been an excellent year for her apples and she has more than a surplus, and I have to say that this one is particularly delicious.

I’m very aware of how good fruit is meant to be for the diet, but I have to confess that I eat it in a rather odd way these days. As a child fruit lived in a fruit bowl, a big cut glass affair at my grandparents and something modelled from laminated teak at home. The substance of the bowl matters not, it was the contents that were all important.

Each week it would be filled with a mixture of apples, pears, oranges and bananas. Some weeks there would be grapes too, but these were seen as being something of a luxury item. Alongside the biscuit tin, the fruit bowl was seen as a reliable source of a sweet treat. A request for a biscuit, one never dared to simply help yourself, could be met with a firm no. No, your tea will be ready soon. No, you’ve already had one today. No, I’m saving those for when your Aunty Nellie comes round for tea.

A request for fruit was more commonly greeted with a yes. Fruit was a source of goodness, a vital element of our diet that would make us healthy and keep, as the proverb claimed, the doctors away. So our diet contained apples and pears, oranges and bananas and the occasional luxury item, like grapes. I did have a kiwi fruit when I was about nine, smuggled in by my dad from Australia but it was a long time before we saw one of those again. And of course in season there were fluffy peaches and plums and even a pomegranate, which I am sure mum bought to keep us quiet, picking out the seeds with a pin. Grapefruits did appear but were served cut in half and sprinkled with demerara sugar and half a glacé cherry!
In the winter the fruit might include tangerines, whatever happened to them? And of course tinned peaches, apricots and pears. I still love tinned pears to this day. I have some secreted at the back of a cupboard for emergencies.

But whatever happened to the fruit bowl? These days I buy fruit and gorge myself on it in a rather irregular fashion. I spot some great looking figs and eat six all in one go. I bag some nice peaches and eat the lot, the same with plums and apricots. Grapes these days I see as a one sitting challenge, a challenge I can easily meet.

“I’m sure most of you think that a great deal of my five a day diet will be made up of fermented grape and hops”

So my question is this; am I a binge fruit eater and is it damaging to my health? Would I be better buying a selection and making sure that I eat some as part of my five a day. I’m sure most of you think that a great deal of my five a day diet will be made up of fermented grape and hops, but that’s not entirely true. I fully acknowledge that I am a binge drinker of sorts – happy not to drink for days on end, then prone to a hard night of consumption with my friends who are in a similar mood. And yes, I know that’s probably not a good idea.

The trouble is, that when I do go the route of the fruit bowl, I tend to forget about it and then, at the end of the week, find some shrivelled specimens and all too often a bit of mould, not nice and certainly not tempting. Help me please before I, like so many younger people, forget how to peel an orange and resort to cartons of juice or frozen fruits of the forest.

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