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Over the years many people have disparaged the way that food portions have been getting bigger and bigger and, again over the years, such exposés as Fast Food Nation or Super Size Me have dwelt on this unfortunate fact at great length (not to mention breadth and width and poundage). But in all this weighty concern there seems to be a blind spot; there is something vital missing. With all the national and international worry about meat and potatoes and fat and refined sugar and their plate-heaving quantities, I have yet to notice the same attention being given to fruit.
Now in the interests of transparency and to maintain my integrity as a broadcaster, I should disclose a personal lack of disinterestedness here, you see fruit is a (if not actually the) main ingredient of my diet, and, in spite of this, even I have difficulty using up the vast quantities of fruit in vast containers that are purveyed around here before it becomes all hairy and festery and goes to that great mulcher in the sky--or, I should (to maintain my integrity as a broadcaster) say rather, to that small mulcher in my back garden. For example, look at the 'buy one ton of strawberries get one free' offers our local Thomb Tum store regularly carries, along with similar super-sized offers for other fruits. Oranges, apples everything now seems to be sold by the crate or the pallet load. 'One size fits all' has taken on a new and threatening meaning, and don't you dare try looking to buy two grapefruit or four loose apples 'cause you'll ruin the economy---indeed the way things are going you could soon easily spend seven hundred billion every time you buy fruit.
You see now-a-days the stores all seem to be catering for families of ten, and this at a time when the average household size in America is estimated as 2.61 (which I suppose represents two parents and what was left of their baby after they had almost won a custody dispute before that famously distributive judge, King Solomon).
But it's not just, nor even, the size of the indivisible containers and offers that fruit now comes in, Oh No! It's the size of the giant fruit that comes in them that really Hitchcock's you right between the eyes.
There are now lurking in your local grocery store, ready to jump out at you, or even at your poor roughly bisected baby, like monsters from really bad Japanese anime or maybe more accurately from 50's monster movies or maybe most accurately of all from the sort of crap that the SciFi channel spews forth, vast, ungovernable Godzillas and Bigfeet of fruit:  strawberries that look like watermelons turned inside out; Kiwi fruit the size of emus and bloody big football playing emus at that; grapes the size of grapefruit; grapefruit the size of combine harvesters that in the third world, or even down the road from our local Thomb Tum, could feed a family of ten for a month---and that's without even taking the pith.
There are apples so vast and so watery---ay there's the rub, for as those fruity Godzillas, those Bigfruit get bigger, they get less fruity and more watery, more insubstantial, so that I predict that eventually they will evolve into planetary clouds and float off upwards and upwards far from their madding orchards; far, far from the Earth itself; to form rotten solar systems of their own elsewhere---apples so vast and so watery that there are several cases on record of people, and I mean fully-grown adult people, actually drowning in them.
And what of the taste of these Bigfreet? It's indescribable, indescribable largely because it isn't there---why even the SciFi channel has more taste!
Indeed it's got so bad that I've now started buying organic fruit, not so much because it's good for me or because it's good for the planet but largely because the bloody stuff tends to be at the very least a reasonable, non-threatening size; and you can actually tell whether you're eating a plum or a banana.
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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