Mongering

Today's post is brought to you by Fruit.

No, seriously.

I have the house to myself this weekend, my mother pursuing long-developed hopes of gaining her PhD. Yesterday I spent in the vague states of mid-sulk and mid-print, banging out technicolor birds and mumbling to myself about my own foolishness. I mustered just enough self-irritation to escape to Jones where I found a parking lot packed with not one but TWO taco-esque trucks and at least 50 people milling around in lines looking dumbstruck with glee. The source of this very public happiness?

The Grilled Cheese Truck, ahoy:





and The Sweets Truck, dishing out red velvet whoopie pies (sort of), and Eclipse t-shirts (??? yes. As in Twilight):



Needless to say, I love both grilled cheeses and sweets of almost all varieties, but for some reason the idea of buying either from a truck, however awesome in concept, didn't really appeal to me. I spent a few minutes gawking at the dessert offerings and though they all looked very pretty and cute, they looked very sugary and a little too finished. Does that make sense? It feels ridiculous typing "too finished," considering my love of French pâtisserie and my own personal obsession with baking beautiful things, but when corners are too squared, or frosting is too even, I feel skeptical. And somehow that translates in my brain's mouth as overwhelming, cloying sweetness. The kind that coats your teeth. I finished my coffee, watched the crowds for a few minutes, and then left. On my way home I stopped by the grocery store with the goal of buying butter and sour cream for the coffee cake I've been wanting to make for a week now. It's been a long time since I wandered around a "normal" grocery store (i.e. not Trader Joe's or Whole Foods) and it was with a slackened jaw and round eyeballs that I walked down aisles of frozen pizza and cereal. In the end, turning down my fleeting desire for Oreos was exceptionally easy (see "cloyingly sweet"), and I only felt even slightly bad about the bag of Cheetos. Which, having eaten a fistful, now strike me as both more underwhelming and overwhelming than I'd remembered. Underwhelming in their taste, and overwhelming in their crunch and that amazing neon orange power they leave on fingers. The bag says "fun food" which I initially misread as "good food." It occurs to me that anything that shade of non-natural couldn't be labeled "good" for fear of a lawsuit.

The coffee cake muffins were fun, especially since I've never made them before. And after watching my friend Laura make amazing streusel for two years, it was nice to discover that I have a hint of that gene as well.

But this post is about FRUIT. So let's get to that.

As quiet and irritable as yesterday was, today has been lovely. I went to Jones with the book I've been reading, The Fruit Hunters. My friend Kate shared a photo from the author Adam Leith Gollner's website and I spent an hour investigating it online before checking it out from the library. I know a lot of you are going to roll your eyes and think "Oh God. Her California is showing," but this book is INCREDIBLE. As the title suggests, it is quite literally about fruit hunting. People scouring the planet for fruit, which I'm learning is both very easy and impossible. Every chapter has a little picture of a very inappropriate looking tentacled/hairy something it took me at least two days to identify as a half-section of a fig. Which is essentially how the book reads. Fascinating, almost embarrassingly erotic, educational, and hilarious. Fruit is all around us, all the time, and we largely ignore it. Sure, I think most of you can attest to a wonderful strawberry tart you ate last month, or how good a fresh peach can be when in season, but there is so much more! Fruit wants us to eat it! It is sweet because fruit and humans evolved to help each other - humans like sweet things, and in order to further their own existence, lots of plants evolved to produce a fruit that would lure us into enjoying it, spreading those plants' seeds in the process. It's so obvious and yet so GENIUS. Doesn't that make you feel extraordinary? You and your apricots are working together. Apparently humans, among very few species, evolved with the ability to differentiate between red and green so we could more easily differentiate between an unripe and ripe fruit. We see and create art because we eat fruit!

Fruit is also super sexy and I wish I could condense or summarize how Adam Gollner gets that point across, but words are failing me. He talks a lot about the history of fruit as aphrodisiac, how some fruits look sexy, and how eating fruit is in itself an erotic (and some say spiritual) experience.

Well, I was reading this book in a very public place, and happened to be sitting next to the poster-couple for why I think I never want to get married. The girl sat down first, young and sassy looking in a pair of yellow flats and short shorts, my age or a year older at most. Her beefcake Abercrombie man (also my age) sat down next to her and she promptly put in her ear buds and turned on her iPod. It was that which caught my attention actually. Who sits down next to their attractive boyfriend and then proceeds to ignore him entirely? Nay - block out any sound he could make? I looked at his left hand and my question was answered: a wedding band. I looked at her left hand... another one. Ah, yes. 25, married, and already done with each other's company. Then she pulled out a copy of "Wuthering Heights," and after looking out into space for a solid half an hour, hubby produced a pocket Bible with a highlighter. Ah, yes.

And here I am, reading a book called The Fruit Hunters and giggling like a school girl:

"Campbell demonstrates how to eat the fruit by sucking on the flesh. After all, it's called a chupa-chupa, which means 'sucky-sucky' in Spanish. I place it in my mouth and suckle on it, releasing a flood of sweet juice flavored like mangoes, peaches, cantaloupes and wildberries. It's sensational" (60).

Is it just me, or does that seem like the perfect bastard child of "Wuthering Heights" and the Bible??? I should've lent it to them. Anyway. I came home, read a few more pages, and then went outside to water the plants. I repotted my basil and tomato, examined my lavender, and told my mom's bonsai I thought it should choose life over death. It was gorgeous outside in the fading sunlight, the birds singing and the wind chimes clanging. The bees zipping through the trumpet tree, and my dog muffling to himself on the grass. I grabbed a nectarine from inside and smelled it - perfectly ripe. I didn't bother with a knife; I skinned it with my teeth, which I can only imagine looked very unbecoming for a jeune fille like myself. But sitting there, with nothing between the nectarine and myself, I thought: this is it. I, jobless and feeling shipwrecked in my own life, am partaking in something mundane and magical. I am enjoying this simple pleasure of being alive. Eatin' fruit. And for now, that's enough.

So, friends (who know think I'm batshit crazy), I invite you to join me in this plaisir. Eat a fruit. Take your time. Smell it. Say no to the red velvet whoopie pie, and get intimate with your produce. I promise it'll never taste so good.