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Saturday, 13 October 2007

The food system...

On bad mandarin

I know it’s my fault. As a local food advocate I shouldn’t have been buying fruit from Coles. But I'm imperfect and inconsistent and it was late at night. Both of the organic grocers were long closed and Manly Food Coop, where I usually shop, had closed even earlier. All that remained open was the supermarket and so it was there I bought the mandarins.

A mystery of marketing

First, an aside. Coles maintains two supermarkets in Manly within a city block of each other, and the reason why has eluded me.

The newer one occupies the ground floor below a block of apartments built a few years ago. It’s not a big supermarket – nor is the older one – but, in comparison to that older, apparently downmarket premises near the wharf it is brightly lit, looks cleaner and has more interesting specialty stock like deli lines and a separate section for organic products.

The olives they sell in the deli, however, are so salty that you have to rinse them lest you dehyrate, shrivel up and turn into a salt-preserved version of yourself. In no way can they hope to compete with the plump, juicy, bottled product from Rosnay Organic Wines and Olives (www.rosnaywines.com.au).

Just this week, while walking past the old Coles supermarket in The Corso, the mystery of the continued existence of two Coles supermarkets so close to each other might have been answered when I overheard a young woman arranging to meet someone "outside the cheap Coles, near the wharf".

So now I know. I shopped at the expensive Coles. I should have known from the decor.

There’s a palpable sense of depression about the old store. If you're after organic lines you might get the impression that there are far fewer of them than in the newer shop and that they are scattered among the non-organic products. It’s saving grace for locals is that the store remains open well into the evening, to around midnight. It is thus useful to people who work late and travel home by ferry.

The downside though, is that small, local business cannot compete on these terms. For Pure Wholefoods that doesn't seem to be anything that bothers them. Walk past their little shop at any daylight hour and you are likely to find plenty of custom, including that in the cafe on the streetfront.

The other organic store in town, Vegies Organics, is up near the wharf and not in such a good positioning, but, somehow, it remains in business.

Let's talk fruit

I’m getting off-subject, though, this is supposed to be about mandarins. And, yes, they looked good on the display, bright orange, big, shiny. So I bought two.

Nearby was a display of black passionfruit, wrinkled looking things though possibly still edible. The going price of 80 cents each was a little over the top. When I made a disparaging remark a little too loudly about them to my friend, a staffer packing the nearby shelves gave me a strange look.

Food of funny quality

I guess I’m a slow learner. This purchase of the two mandarin is not the first time I have found supermarket fruit to be, well, let’s say... a little aged. I once bought a supermarket lemon that I found to be completely rotten inside. So rotten was it that I started to question the age of the fruit that supermarkets put on display.

Let’s be balanced here. I have bought similarly bad fruit from organic food shops and, occasionally, from the food co-op, including apples that were... hmm... somewhat floury, shall we say. Now I closely look at and feel all of the fruit I think of buying irrespective of whether its organic or supermarket.

Some time ago I had the doubtful joy of taking a bite of a supermarket apple to experience not the juicy freshness you are supposed to taste when you bite it, but a sort of mouldy, oxidised taste. Outside, the fruit was shiny green. Inside, it was soft and brown.

I thought back to the fresh apples I used to get in Tasmania, where they are grown, and seriously considered for a moment that mainlanders really must have a distorted impression of the fruit if this mushy stuff is what they accept.

Later, I read in the Sydney Morning Herald how some supermarket apples are stored for a year before being offered for sale. I was a bit astounded at this revelation but now I believe it. And one of those big chains that peddle these vintage fruits calls itself ‘the fresh food people’.

Those mandarins

Yes, the mandarins. My partner broke one open at home. She looked. I looked. Not quite normal, is it, we thought, as we assessed the pale yellow-orange thing on the bench. The fruit’s consistency... let’s just say that it was 'hard'.

This was weapons grade fruit, I realised. Give the thing sufficient velocity and it would make a fine kinetic energy weapon capable of penetrating tank armor. Into the compost bucket it went, landing with a noticeable CLUNK!

I settled for a home-grown, yellow passionfruit picked from our vine just the day before. A fine specimen it was, too, a matrix of bright yellow, juicy pulp with dark seeds embedded in it.

Now I know. Having learned my lesson, next time I will put off the anticipation of sweetness at the sight of supermarket mandarins, of any supermarket fruit for that matter. I'll wait until the next day when I can walk down to my local food coop or one of the organic stores to buy an authentic, genuine mandarin.