The Man Who Ate Everything (11 page)

The round depression at one end of many melons is where the stem was attached; if it is smooth, without ragged edges, the melon was ripe enough to slip easily from the stem. Softening, aroma, and waxiness begin at the opposite or blossom end, which is where sniffing will tell you worlds about how sweet and perfumed the melon is inside. Experts clash on whether the aroma of an uncut honeydew is expressive. Casabas have little aroma and are an inferior species overall. Sorry.

19. Any advice about storage?

At your service. Fruits capable of ripening after they are picked should be encouraged to do so at room temperature, inside a paper bag or out. Then these fruits, and all those incapable of ripening after harvest, should be eaten immediately or refrigerated (to slow respiration) in a plastic bag (to prevent water loss). Dehydration is the greatest enemy of freshness in ripened fruit and other produce. Lettuce leaves wilt when their cells deflate from the loss of water. Try putting wilted lettuce in cold water; you will be amazed.

But don’t seal the plastic bag tight, or the fruit will ferment
and mold.

Before a fruit is ripe, refrigerator temperature will retard the process, may turn the sweeter sugars into glucose, can permanently deactivate the softening powers of polygalacturonase, and may increase acidity. Given enough time, chilling will injure fruits of tropical and semitropical origin both before and after ripening. Avoid buying very cold fruit in the grocery store. Not only will you be unable to evaluate its aroma, but chilling injuries (such as the mushy, fibrous flesh of a damaged peach) may not become apparent until the fruit returns to room temperature.

20. Is all this supposed to explain why most fruit in American supermarkets, except maybe cherries, is so awful?

Partly. There are other reasons too. Until recently, fruit breeders concentrated only on size, color, firmness, and supernaturally uniform shape, at the expense of flavor, sweetness, and texture. Some growers demand trees on which all the fruit matures at
once, making it easier to harvest by machine. Others overfertili
ze
to increase their yield and overirrigate to increase the fruits’ weight shortly before harvest. And some years the weather refuses to cooperate. But ripeness is, to paraphrase the poet, the biggest deal of all.

There are four villains in the ripeness story: the greedy grower, the venal wholesaler, the shortsighted retailer, and the ignorant and stingy consumer like you and me.

To save on labor costs, growers use machines to pick, sort, and pack their fruit. Ripe fruit cannot survive a run-in with these machines. And when mechanical harvesters are used, they pick everything in sight—hard green, barely mature, and nearly ripe. Growers know that early fruit commands a higher price; all growers would like to recover their investment as soon in the season as possible; and most would like to sell whatever has not ripened by season’s end. Citrus growers pick early when they fear a frost.

Growers complain that fruit brokers and retailers make them compete on the basis of price alone, not with texture or flavor. Brokers contend that retailers refuse to accept delivery of produce too ripe to have a long and happy shelf life. Retailers say that brokers buy only the easiest fruit to handle; they blame consumers for their unwillingness to pay more for more delicious fruit. The magic of the marketplace has somehow failed us when inferior fruit forces out produce of higher quality.

But some rays of hope do flicker through the darkening clouds of American fructiculture. Take Ron Mansfield. He is a grower in El Dorado County, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, where he farms several small parcels, leaving his peaches and nectarines on the trees until three or four days before they would drop of their own accord; his tree-ripened peaches have at least twice the sugar of those picked just at physical maturity and ripened off the tree. Mansfield picks and packs them by hand i
n
single-layer wooden boxes, and two days later they are offered at fancy produce stores and restaurants on both coasts (and at his
own retail farm stand). Mansfield knows only three or four other California growers who try to ship fruit of equal quality.

Margaret and Bill Skaife of Oceanside, California, near San Diego, have designed hand-harvesting and packing procedures and clever containers (patent pending) for shipping nearly ripe tomatoes, strawberries, and stone fruit to distant markets. (The fruits are suspended by their stems and cushioned from swinging against their neighbors.) Their first tomato crop, offered to consumers with a gold sticker and a money-back guarantee, was a great success at stores like Balducci’s in New York, which sold two thousand pounds of them during peak weeks. But the Skaifes are still dependent on the farming practices and cultivars of growers in California and Mexico with whom they contract.

The methods (and prices) of the LTD company represent a workable compromise for the mass market. Growers who sell to LTD harvest their fruit an average of three days later than other growers; the Stop & Shop supermarket chain in New England, which has developed one of the most active programs in the country to improve the quality of fruit, is one of their big customers. But nothing, I am told, beats a Ron Mansfield peach.

Elsewhere, the future looks grim. Most American stone fruit is grown in California—96 percent of all apricots, 90 percent of nectarines and plums, and 60 percent of freestone peaches and Bartlett pears. The fruit is harvested nearly rock hard, ten or fifteen days before it is ripe, to allow for rough picking, mechanical handling, and prolonged transportation. All but the firmest fruit would be destroyed by this ordeal. Under the California Tree Fruit Agreement—a joint federal-state-industry “marketing order” in effect in one form or other since 1933—growers could not ship their fruit unless it met a minimum standard known as California Well-Matured. This simply guaranteed that most tree fruit would be fully developed and consequently that it would improve at least in color and texture after harvest. Now the California stone-fruit growers want to harvest their produce even earlier.

Last year the plum growers pulled out of the agreement. Early this year a dissident group of peach and nectarine growers persuaded the USDA to add an alternate, lower standard known as U.S. No. 1 or U.S. Mature. This will allow them to harvest even earlier and greener provided they say so on their shipping cartons. One rationale is that Georgia peaches have long been held to the equivalent of the trifling U.S. No. 1 standard and can compete unfairly. And Colorado growers recently abandoned their federal-state inspection program entirely. To fruit fanciers, the old criteria were undemanding enough. The new system promises even less.

In a twist of fate, the predominantly Republican California growers were temporarily foiled by President Bush’s election-year moratorium on new federal regulations. For the new two-tier fruit inspection system to circumvent the moratorium and go into effect, the vice president’s Council on Competitiveness must certify that the regulations are “pro-growth,” a term apparently not intended in its horticultural sense. At this writing, the only person who can save America from a catastrophic plunge in the quality of its peaches and nectarines is Vice President Dan Quayle. Any bets?

July 1992

Everybody’s in a panic these days about the dangers of eating raw shellfish. But I have a plan. I’ve decided to give up skiing this winter so that I can eat my fill. By my calculations, the chance of suffering a substantial injury in one day of skiing is ten times worse than the chance of getting sick from eating a plate of cold, plump, briny, succulent raw oysters or clams. It follows that if I give up ten days of skiing, I can feast on oysters twice a week for the entire year.

To be perfectly truthful, I’ve never skied a day in my life or eaten less than my fill of anything. My plan was born at supper with an unfortunate friend, fresh from the slopes and hospitals of Aspen, where he had broken his shoulder by crashing into
a
shrub on
a
downhill run. He wore a brace on his upper torso and needed help turning the pages of his menu. I immediately recovered from excessive feelings of sympathy as I watched my friend choose his food with a superstitious adherence to every modern nutritional fad and rumor he had ever heard. For the life of me, I cannot understand why some people are eager to take on all sorts of dangers and then go paranoid over a much less risky endeavor— especially when that endeavor is dinner.

We
do
have ample cause to be worried about seafood safety. An investigation in the February 1992 issue of
Consumer Reports
found that a full 44 percent of the seafood its staff purchased at
supermarkets and fish stores contained unacceptable levels of fecal coliform bacteria, which can cause all sorts of gastrointestinal illnesses. The federal government has shirked its duty to ensure the safety of our seafood, and proposals are now before Congress to remedy the situation.

Most bacteria and viruses are destroyed by cooking, which is why the federal Food and Drug Administration recommends that fish be cooked to 145 degrees Fahrenheit or until it flakes easily at the center near the bone; oysters and clams should be boiled for four to six minutes. These are reliable recipes for cataclysmically overcooked seafood.

Raw shellfish is where most of the danger lurks. In 1991 the FDA conducted a risk assessment of fish and shellfish in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control and discovered that, when raw or partially cooked mollusks (mussels, clams, and oysters) are excluded, only one illness results from every two million servings of seafood. This is an extremely low number compared to the danger of eating chicken, with one illness in every twenty-five thousand servings.

But when raw or partially cooked shellfish is added in, the risk jumps eightfold. Raw clams, oysters, and mussels account for 85 percent of all seafood-borne illnesses. One in every two thousand servings of raw mollusks is likely to make somebody ill.

As high as this number seems, it means that if you eat a plate of raw oysters every week, you will get sick once in forty years or twice in a full and happy lifetime. And you can reduce the risk further by avoiding the main threat—raw mollusks taken from March to October in the Gulf of Mexico, when they are likely to be infected with
Vibrio vulnificus.
The warmer the water and the higher the temperature at which oysters are shipped and stored, the greater the danger. This is the principal rationale for the old rule of thumb that oysters should be eaten only in months whose name contains an
r,
because these are the cold-weather months^ from September through April. (A second reason is epicurea
n
oysters spawn in warmer weather
, depleting their tasty glycogen
and losing their succulence.) These days, Gulf oysters are safe, if at all only from November through February.

For the very young, the very old, and people with weakened immune systems, including those who are HIV-positive, an infection by
Vibrio vulnificus
from a contaminated oyster can lead to death. But for most diners, the worst outcome is a day or two of unpleasant and unsightly gastrointestinal distress.

If raw shellfish makes you sick once in every two thousand servings, how does this compare to the hazards of going skiing? The statistics are elusive—the skiing industry does not encourage the collection and publication of data. But there seems to be general agreement that a substantial injury occurs once in every 250 days of skiing or, at the least, once in 400. These include leg fractures, spine fractures, contusions, lacerations, and knee injuries. A study in Munich found at least one minor injury in every 59 days of skiing and a really serious disaster in every 500; it defined “serious” as meaning that the skier would be off the slopes for at least 3 days. My last bad oyster kept me from table for only one. And most accident surveys leave out gondola crashes, skiers’ smashing into each other in the subarctic cold; the danger of radiation (the yearly risk of cancer from cosmic rays is two-thirds greater at the altitude of Denver than at sea level, where oysters live); and injuries that blossom after the skier returns home, like the newly popular sprain of the ulnar collateral ligament of the metacarpophalangeal joint of the thumb. To say that a day of skiing is ten times more dangerous than a delicious plate of oysters is, I think, an act of generosity to the sport and its hapless participants.

Ski apologists point out that skiers suffer fewer
fatalities
than swimmers, cyclists, or equestrians, and that skiing is, on an hourly basis, no more dangerous than junior-high-school football. This may be a welcome consolation prize to the skiing industry, but it is even better news to me. It means that if I am willing to give up junior-high-school football this fall, I can happily devour all the sushi, sashimi, and ceviche that my heart desires.

October 1992

Playing Ketchup

In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce.

—
MARQUIS DOMENICO CARACCIOLO (1715—1789)

When rumor recently reached my ears that U.S. sales of salsa would soon eclipse those of ketchup, catsup, and catchup (these words all mean the same thing), I rushed down to my local supermarket, planted myself in the ketchup department, and stood a lonely, anxious vigil, as though my presence alone could stanch the tide of chunky, piquant salsa that menaced from the opposite end of aisle 5.