A friend recently returned to New York after living in Bali for a few years, and after catching up on other things, we talked about fruit for a full 20 minutes. She sent me photos of the breakfasts she used to have overseas, plates abundant with low-cost local fruit; I complained about paying $8 for precut melon.
The passion of the conversation surprised both of us. It’s not impeachment or Saudi hacking, but the fruit habits of most New Yorkers in the winter months – particularly those with children – are a source of constant low-level scandal. There is something very wrong with this picture.
We didn’t have strawberries in January. I find myself saying this to my children all the time, sounding like Laurie Lee or a Paul Whitehouse character from the 1990s. In winter you had apples, and they weren’t nice ones, either. They were kept in a paper bag in the garage and had the waxy sheen of the recently embalmed. There were pears too – svelte, hard as granite, tapering to a point at one end – and the odd decadent tangerine. Beyond that it was slim pickings until spring.
Now my children eat strawberries every day, all year round. I haven’t done the maths, but the annual strawberry spend will be something horrendous. They eat melon too, and mango, both precut – which is, I know, a big step on the road to the apocalypse. “What tax bracket are you in that you buy precut mango?” asked my friend, and she’s right. Ounce for ounce, it is probably more expensive than heroin.
In this case it’s not an expression of wealth but desperation; last thing at night, when the kids are asleep, I can’t force myself to go on fruit-dicing duty. (There’s an extra level with the mango, which is logistical: when grappling with a ripe mango, I always feel as if I’m one wrong move away from slashing my artery).
The excuses I make: I can’t get my kids to eat a green vegetable, it’s 50/50 with the apples and it’s flu season so at least this will give them a dose of vitamin C. Every few weeks I have an extra burst of guilt and energy and order pineapples from Costco, but it never works out. We all live in these apartments where we have no control over the thermostat, and they’re heated throughout the winter to 90 degrees. You turn your back for a second and, before you know it, the two strapping young pineapples on your counter have gone the full Benjamin Button: spikes drooping, bases furry, flesh as decomposed as the system that made them an option in January in New York.
The real culprit here, I know, is our attitude to gratification and waste, and something more indistinct about buying into a promise of wellbeing. Without fully realising it, I’ve been infected by Goop logic of attaching talismanic properties to everyday things. It’s good to eat fruit, of course, but why am I spending $4 on a single passion fruit as if it will save me? The cost of all this – personal, environmental – suggests that at this point, nothing much will.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
