Read “The Corruption of Fruit” in my new website:
Give Fruit a Chance
Walk into any large grocery store in the United States, and you will easily find a wide arrange of fruits and vegetables. This selection usually encompasses all the colors of the rainbow, and contains perfectly looking produce, ready to be consumed.
More often than not, that produce comes from all over the world, with few options grown locally. Most of the fruits and vegetables for sale are out of season, and they often have been frozen, or set in cold storage for multiple months. We are no longer confined to growing seasons, but this comes at a cost.
Farmers have bred crops for thousands of years. Selective breading may be as old as agriculture itself. It is a common practice for farmers to chose specific crops after each harvest, pick the best seeds, and only breed those.
Additional methods, such as cross-breeding and hybridization, combine two or more plants to create an offspring that carries the best traits of their parent plants.
One of the most common techniques used in modern times is called “genetic modification”. That is were the infamous GMOs come from. Some of the traits developed for more desirability include sweetness, pest resistance, size, and color.
Fruits and vegetables barely resemble their original forms, colors, and taste. Peaches used to be much smaller, with almost half of the fruit being the seed. Their natural taste was sour. Bananas were full of hard seeds, and had a tough skin. Tomatoes looked more like berries, they were small and sour. Carrots where much thinner than they are today.
Mutations in the genetics of fruits and vegetables may have been essential for human development, but they have been disadvantageous to the plant in its natural setting. Genetic modifications reduce the new generation’s ability to endure their natural environment and reproduce. Many species of plants have been bred out, leading to loss of diversity.
As an example, there are hundreds of different varieties of bananas, but most people have only seen one of them. The Cavendish banana, commonly grown in Ecuador, accounts fro 97% of the bananas consumed around the world.
This agricultural approach is known as, monoculture, the cultivation of a single crop in a given area. Monoculture tends to damage entire ecosystems, based on its high use of agrochemicals. It pollutes the water supply, contaminates the soil, and can have devastating impacts on worker health.
Adding insult to injury, markets offer all sorts of processed products that barely resemble fruit in their natural state. As an example, most fruit juices at the store have added sugar, or some other unnecessary ingredients such as calcium or magnesium. They contain preservatives to lengthen their shelf life, and colorants to make them more attractive to those who don’t know better. In some of the worse cases, these unnatural fruit juices contain traces of toxic chemicals, such as cadmium, lead, mercury, and inorganic arsenic.
As we dive deeper into raw vegan and fruit based diets, its imperative to remember that not all fruits are the same. An imported Cavendish banana, that set in storage for months, is very different from a locally grown banana, that ripened on the tree, and was harvested a few days ago.
Choose your fruits and vegetables wisely. Always search for local and organic produce. Educate yourself on where your produce comes from, and if possible, try growing your own.
