After talking down the lime/lemon situation the other day, I thought I’d say something positive about Turkish produce. My housemate just brought me this bowl of fruit he assembled from stuff he bought down at the bazaar this afternoon. That’s ice on the top— bazaar fruit sits in the sun all day, of course, and so it needs cooling down before eating (unless you enjoy eating warm fruit in the summer, which I don’t).
The fruit in the photo is actually quite pretty as Turkish fruit goes. One of the things I noticed when I first moved across the Atlantic is that the fruit and vegetables are ugly on this side of the world. Fruit in the United States is very uniform and plasticky. Produce sections in supermarkets look like they were constructed in a wax factory. Oranges are all the same shape, size, and colour, as are apples, lemons, and every other kind of fruit. So when I first moved to Europe, it was a shock to see lemons that were twisted and bulbous and unevenly coloured. Strawberries were particularly mutant, coming in all shapes and sizes and looking like they had horrible birth defects. For a long time I didn’t really partake of European fruit because I was scared of it.
But as it turns out, the fruit over in this hemisphere tastes wonderful. It’s twisted and deformed because it’s natural, and the flavour is heavenly. It wasn’t until I went back to the United States for a visit that I was shocked to be re-introduced to cosmetically perfect fruit; I was impressed by the looks and bought a huge bag of it, only to be disappointed to find out that despite the vivid colours and beautiful shapes, it all just tasted like watered-down nothing. Blah.
A lot of our fruits and vegetables here in Turkey look nice by coincidence, but my favourite Mediterranean produce comes from Italy. When I first saw Italian produce markets I thought they had been attacked by some kind of plant version of bubonic plague. Produce in Italy is incredibly freeform— huge, twisty vegetables and fruits with bumps and knots and all sorts of other malformations. If you’re not used to natural-looking produce it can appear horrible at first, but in my opinion Italian produce is some of the best in the world. If you live in the United States and can find a farmer’s market or somewhere other than a supermarket to buy your fruit and vegetables, I encourage you to try that out and see if you can’t taste the difference, despite having to get used to the visual aesthetics. I’ll never buy produce in a supermarket again.
Which reminds me, it’s that time of the week and I should head down to do the shopping— those bazaar goodies don’t find themselves.