Pricey produce provides plenty of pique

Since it has been a while since a fresh blog post, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about something close to my heart, fresh produce. I sort of feel like Kramer from Seinfeld in how much I like the fruit here in Australia. There is an ad on the television talking about general health and nutrition that advises that one consume two fruit and five veg in the course of a day. My ideal ratio is reversed though. I can easily consume five pieces of fruit in a day. The discerning fruit buyer however must keep careful watch of the prices due to constant fluctuation. This threw me off initially, as one can imagine stepping into a new country with no context for determining what you might feel to be a fair price. My experience in Canada is that we have fairly consistent prices and after you shop for a while you come to know what is reasonable. Now transplant that knowledge to a place where the prices can double overnight and you have the recipe for a rip off. Of course in Canada we have adopted the System Internationale for weights and measures but this hasn’t really permeated through the vernacular in every way. Our highway signs are all metric but we buy lumber imperially. Similarly, everyone in Canada knows their height and weight in feet and pounds, though officially we are full on metric. In Australia, they actually use the metric system officially as well as colloquially. In the grocery sense, this means that when you’re used to the price of a cantaloupe (actually poor example, here they’re called rock melons) in dollars per pound, the price per kilogram is a tad confusing. Naturally the conversion is fairly simple to do in your head, but that extra 0.2 kg/pound adds up. An interesting sidenote is that when all of your understandings about weights and measures are based on one system and somebody is bragging to you using a different measure, it doesn’t carry the same weight, if you will. For example, somebody gloating about the 220 kW engine in their Holden Commodore doesn’t invoke the grunting appreciation in me that a similarly testosteronically fuelled discussion of a 295 hp engine in their Ford Festiva would to someone in North America. But I digress.
I still don’t really understand the economics of fruit production. It has been explained to me that the low population here means that things are so expensive, but they grow stuff locally. So little fruit that is sold in Canada is produced locally, but still it is relatively cheap. Carrots and apples come from California but are sold very cheaply. In Australia, there is a lot of fruit grown all over the place, and in Sydney we are only a few hours’ drive from apple orchards and the like. Even so, it is quite expensive and the price seriously fluctuates. The price of an avocado probably fluctuates between $1 and $3 each in a two week period. Actually, now that I wrote that I couldn’t say with confidence that an avocado is a fruit, but the point is made nonetheless. It has also been suggested that weather patterns greatly affect the price of produce here. Apparently a few years ago there was some major weather situation that influenced the banana crop in Queensland. Bananas went up to $20 a kilogram or about $10 a pound. This may not sound bad except when it is normally around $2/kg. A tenfold increase in the cost of a banana. The story is told that in those heady days it became quite a status symbol to be seen consuming banana products. To show up your status conscious friends, you would merely take a banana out of your bag and jaws would drop. Oh, he eats bananas they would say. The local equivalent of Entertainment Tonight would have daily stories about rich people and their banana consumption. Hugh Jackman smiling with his gleaming teeth as he carries a bunch from the local fruit stand.
This extreme in the cost of fruit is not limited to bananas. I was at the grocery store the other day and I was examining a little packet of raspberries. I suppose they must not be grown very broadly, but they were a product of Australia. It was a small plastic container. I was rendered mute by the price: 6 dollars for the packet. This was a container about the size of your palm, holding 125 grams of the red berry gold. This is about $50 a pound. I have nothing more to say as I cannot comment beyond that...I mean, really, we have raspberry bushes that just won’t die at home. Everybody can grow raspberries. I just don’t get it. What’s next, rhubarb at $2 a stalk? You know how in the fall you’ll get a knock on the door and there will be no one there, just a zucchini? People with gardens can never get rid of their zucchini, so they have to resort to guerrilla tactics to get rid of them. Just imagine if there was a huge run on zucchini and the price went up to $50 a kilogram. Then on the riders that the rap stars had on their contracts to play would include zucchinis along with the bottles of Cristal and the beluga caviar.