A "fresh" new post: What if our produce could talk...

If the fruit and vegetables at your average American grocery store could talk, what would they say?

This “fresh” food could surely tell you a few travel stories because it has probably traveled more than the average American citizen. In fact, because you can purchase almost every type of fruit or vegetable at any time of the year, I would wager that most people do not know seasonal produce cycles, nor do they know where in the world their mid-winter grapes come from.

As Americans die of “lifestyle” diseases rather than viruses or bacterial infections, more and more studies focus on how to make our lifestyle “healthier”. Newspapers and TV programs now beat us over the head, telling us that in order to be healthy, we need to consume “fresh” fruit and vegetables. In 1988 fresh vegetable consumption finally equaled processed vegetable consumption, and while in 1975 the average American supermarket produce department sold 65 items, in 1988 the same produce department sold 210 items. Clearly, we all know that we should be eating more fruits and veggies, and we have come to learn that the little pieces of carrot in canned chicken noodle soup do not count toward our daily requirement of “fresh” vegetables.

So what do we mean by “fresh” fruit and vegetables. How do you define the term, “fresh.” In my mind, fresh should indicate both time and place—so if we say that our shirt is “fresh out of the laundry,” we mean that it was recently washed. Or a batch of, “freshly baked cookies,” means that they just came out of the oven. Even the term, “freshman,” indicates a student in their first year of high school. “Fresh” indicates that something comes from a time not too long ago, and a place not too far away.

However, over the past twenty years, not only has our consumption of “fresh” fruits and vegetables shifted, but so has the social usage of the word, “fresh”.

Something to ponder: Walter Goldfrank, a professor of sociology and Latin American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, observed that rather than an indication of time and place, “fresh,” has come to mean, “not ostensibly processed,” or made into something different. The fact that produce is picked weeks, or even months, in advance, then cooled, stored, and shipped with the aid of spoilage-retardant chemicals, and then handled by multiple human hands at multiple job sites in several different countries does not deter us from using the term, “fresh.” Freshness than, indicates inherent pristine appearance, rather than signifying the space/time proximity to the consumer.

So how “fresh” is our produce? How many countries has it been to? How many people has it met?—all before it goes into our salad. Like I said, if our “fresh” produce could talk, I bet it could tell some really interesting travel stories.