An apple is never just an apple

Big-box food retailers would like to convince us that an apple or a pear is the same no matter how it is grown or where we buy it.  They want customers to accept corporate branding as the assurance of flavor instead of our own taste buds.  Despite what industrial agriculture wants us to believe, however, an apple is not just an apple.  Each apple is the end product of a way of life.

Applies are not the only food item influenced by corporate food giants.  Take the tomato, for example.  A taste test quickly proves the point.  Juice oozes from a Thistle Farm tomatoes, while I need a serrated blade to pierce and cut the skin of a South American winter wonder found at Wal-Mart.  I may have to settle for an off-season import, but nothing will convince me that those two tomatoes are the same.

When we shop at a big-box food center rather than a Farmers Market, we lose control over freshness, quality, and variety of our foods.  Instead of an apple picked by hand by the orchard’s owner and delivered to market the next day, industrially produced fruits and vegetable arrive unripe and weary after a long journey from a far-away farm.  Then, in hangar-sized regional distribution centers, produce is “ripened” artificially with carefully regulated doses of ethylene gas. 

Fortunately for big-box stores, apples exposed to ethylene for 24 to 48 hours will ripen more uniformly than in the orchard.  With a little more ethylene, above the two days already endured, even less mature, rock-hard apples will begin to turn red.  Now, these perfectly-sized fruits that have been perfectly ripened are ready for reshipment to a local super-sized food store.