mushmouth

I don’t know exactly when but at some point about twenty years ago, fruit began scaring the hell out of me. That is, it stopped tasting like fruit but became some kind of polyurethane, styrofoamy fake slobber that was mostly water and texture. Bad texture. Mealy apples. Rough and porous peaches. Cantaloupes like rubber. And dry oranges that fell apart in my mouth. Like most people, I always loved fruit – real fruit. Flavorful, in-season fruit. Now, anticipating some horrible surprise. I’m afraid to even buy it. You really can’t tell by looking anymore. Everything looks perfect. This applies to vegetables, too, for example, hothouse tomatoes, which exist just to give your greens some red contrast. If I were a photographer who ate cardboard, things would be fine. The only vegetable that seems to have fallen off agri-science’s radar screen is the lowly and unsexy radish. They’re still crunchy, and now inconsolably lonely.