The Unappreciated Boysenberry

There used to be a place in my hometown of North Little Rock, Ark., called Sue's Pie Shop, and one of the pies I loved to order there was a piece of boysenberry pie. I remembered how wonderful that pie was when I read this article from the Los Angeles Times.

The Times' David Karp writes:

To the uninitiated, the boysenberry may look like a big, blowzy, underripe fruit, but it is in fact a noble fruit, as distinct from a common blackberry as a thoroughbred is from a mule.

Large, dark purple, juicy and intense, it derives its unique flavor from its complex ancestry: sweetness and floral aroma from its raspberry grandmother cousin, and a winy, feral tang from three native blackberry species.

It's a California classic . . . [a]nd it's all the more precious despite its near extinction in this state, because it evokes why people moved here in the first place.

. . . they are so delicate that as a fresh fruit they can be enjoyed at their best only from farmers markets, farm stands, and home gardens.

I wish boysenberries grew abundantly here in the mid-Atlantic. The delicate nature of this fruit is what must make the mass-fruit producers hate them -- they don't ship well. But I'll take a pint of fresh boysenberries over those tastless, oversized, not-yet-ripe strawberries that get shipped to the East Coast this time of year.

Acai Steps Onto the U.S. Stage

If you had asked me about acai 10 years ago, I would have shrugged my shoulders and replied, "What?" In 2005, I tasted acai berries for the first time -- at a juice bar in Brazil.

I enjoyed drinking acai (it's best in combination with other fruits) and wondered why it was virtually unknown in the U.S. Five years later, acai is sold as part of beverages and other food products in many areas of our country, and it has created quite a buzz.

This slide show at the N.Y. Times' website shows how acai berries are grown, how they are picked and how they are processed into food products.

A Very Forbidding Fruit

I have never been to Singapore, but there's an exotic, spiny fruit native to the country called a durian. It's widely eaten by the masses. But one wonders if they hold their noses while they're munching away.

In this post last month, N.Y. Times blogger Matt Gross called the durian "the most wretched-smelling fruit in the world." In fact, this fruit gives off such an unpleasant odor that Singapore's mass-transit system posts signs urging passengers not to carry durians aboard its trains.

If you're curious what a durian looks like and just how smelly it is, check out this YouTube video.

This longtime Singapore resident loves durians but admits it's a "purely personal taste." And here's a N.Y. Times article from 1994 that closely examines this "forbidding fruit."

Stop the Stickers . . . Please

It seems that unless you go to a farmers' market, you can't buy a piece of fruit anywhere that doesn't have a sticker on it -- sometimes more than one.

Usually, the stickers give you information that you already knew from the sign that appeared in the grocery store. If you're interested in eating a piece of fruit out of hand, it gets annoying having to look for the sticker and pull it off. And sometimes those stickers can be difficult to peel off without digging your finger into the fruit.

As this N.Y. Times article explains, I'm not the only one who has found this frustrating. An elderly woman from Clarksville, Tex., voiced this complaint:

"I was picking all the little stickers from the Piggly Wiggly off my plums and my avocado pears and my peaches. Then I had to make fruit salad out of the ones that got hurt when I took the stickers off, and then I had to wash the glue off the other ones before I put them in the fruit bowl."

I love her choice of words -- "the ones that got hurt." How pervasive is this? Well, check out this photo that someone posted on Flickr, and you get a sense for how sticker-happy the grocery stores have become.

Grocery chains need to stop doing this. It's annoying as hell. Let your signs tell us what kind of pear or peach that is. Stop slapping stickers on everything.