My family and I are huge fans of fruit. Ever since I was little, we always had some type of fruit in the house. There were berries in the summer, apples in the fall, and grapefruits and oranges in the winter. I enjoy eating fruit because they are not only sweet, but are also a healthy alternative to other processed snacks. However, in the last few years, I’ve found that our kitchen is no longer filled with fruits, and I haven't been able to eat them everyday like I could when I was younger.
This is not because I’ve begun to dislike them. It’s because good fruit has become more and more scarce over the years. Sure, in every supermarket there is a whole section filled with all kinds of fruit. But, when one looks closely, you can see that the quality of these fruits is very poor. Nowadays, buying fruit is like pulling a prize out of a mystery box: the texture might be mushy, it might not be sweet enough, there may be hidden bruises, etc. Just last week, my mom bought a bag of oranges and all of them turned out rotten, despite looking perfectly fine on the outside. We threw them away.
I’m not exactly sure of why fruit quality has declined over the years, but I do know why good ones are so hard to get. First of all, fruits are best when they are fresh: berries straight off the plant are always much better than ones bought in supermarkets. And this is the main problem. Most of the time, people get fruits from the supermarket because fresher fruit sources like farmer markets and fruit-picking are not only seasonal, but also more expensive and inconvenient. Unfortunately, supermarkets never have fresh fruit. All fruits are imported from other parts of the country or even from other continents. In order to preserve these fruits during the long transportation process to supermarkets, they are sprayed with chemicals. Additionally, once fruits are on the shelves, they are coated with yet more preservatives to stay “fresh” for extremely long periods of time. According to this article, on average, apples in supermarkets are over one years old. Of course, this means these apples, just like any other fruit left to rot away in supermarkets, don’t taste good at all.
Sometimes I wonder if there will be any fruits to eat a few decades from now. This past year has been the most scarce in fruit for my family. This is most likely due to COVID-19, but I haven't looked much into this. I hope that there will be some solutions to the decline of fruit quality in the future. Perhaps one of them is to create completely genetically modified fruit. This also makes me a little concerned about people’s diets in the future. Will there be no more fresh food? Will we resort to eating only processed foods with numerous, unknown chemicals?
My family is also a big fan of fruit. We especially like watermelon, honeydew, cantaloupe and grapes. I think that COVID has a key factor in the lack of fruit production for this year. I think another reason could be that especially in this area, a large number of factories and warehouses have gone up and on farmland that was previously used for fruits and vegetable growth. I think as well the demand for fruit is high, which can lead to some companies giving out fruit as "quantity over quality," while local farmers and their markets tend to make sure that it is "quality over quanitity."
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