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Holly Lake Effect

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Remember sweet?
Sweetness seems to be an experience of memory. You look for it in ordinary things, things you remember as having been "sweet" and realize it no longer exists as a natural ingredient.
Take for instance the fruit in the richly supplied produce section of any supermarket. Apples. Radiant on the outside, grim inside. Soft and pulpy. No flavor. Like biting into cardboard. You wonder how long those apples have been lying in some kind of storage facility. When were they hanging from a tree or were they ever on a tree? Perhaps there are apple factories where all fruits are manufactured using different kinds of ingredients. If so they should never have been labeled "sweet". But then maybe sugar too is no longer sweet, maybe it no longer is squeezed out of those long purple tubes we used to call "sugar cane." Come to think of it I haven't seen sugar cane in my recent travels around Texas and I've failed to spot the long purple stalks in the fall at roadside produce stands. Never, of course have I seen sugar cane in a supermarket.
Then there are other fruits we always used to call "sweet". They are still called that but now it is a false description like the creamy white stuff in a tube that's guaranteed to make your teeth shine like a crab nebula. It's all designed to lure you away from your money. "Sweet raspberries", says the sign over the frail little baskets of bright red fruit priced at $5.95. I know for a fact those berries are filled with vinegar, maybe even have had vinegar pumped into them in the belief that it is some kind of preservative. Anyway when you dump them into a bowl, pour a bit of cream or milk over them you had better be prepared to have your mouth draw up in the shape of a lemon because that's what you're about to eat-lemons disguised as raspberries. Same way with blackberries. They look so fat and healthy in their little cartons and the sign always says "sweet". But sweet is what they aren't. Be prepared to pour over them a large amount of some kind of sugar or artificial substitute if you hope to capture the memory of when you went blackberry picking along the roadside, way back in history when all fruits were sweet. Naturally. You can come up with a whole string of fruit names-watermelon, cantaloupe, grapes, blueberries and so forth. You will be disappointed if you expect them to be sweet. You may even have a trick for determining their ripeness which is considered to be an acceptable indication of sweetness. You thump a watermelon. You twist at its stem to see if it comes off easily. If it sounds hollow like an old bass drum or like a rock hitting the side of a metal washtub, you can be pretty sure it will be sweet. Or you used to be sure. You shake a honeydew to see if the seeds rattle. If they make a nice "gravel-hitting-the-windowpane sound", you used to be able to say, confidently, that those fruits were ripe. And sweet. But again ripe doesn't necessarily mean sweet. There used to be another layer of ripening called "sweetening"which those old-timey fruits were allowed to go through. Sort of a dress rehearsal just to be sure everything was up to sweet-tooth standards. It's pretty obvious they don't do that anymore,
If you think fruits from foreign countries-labeled "Produce of Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina",etc.-will be sweeter think again. You get the picture of little boys picking the fruit off the trees on their family's ranchito. They are smiling. They are grabbing quick bites of mango, strawberry, or other fruit-still smiling. What makes a kid like that smile, you think? It's got to be he's just had a bite of something sweet.So what happens to all that sweetness between the time the fruit hit their taste buds and arrives in the produce section of one of our markets? That's the big question. All I know is the stuff's not sweet. It looks good, it looks perfect, in fact. It looks to be bursting at the seams with natural sugars. Gorgeous color. Nice feel. But cut a plum or peach open, bite into it and you'd better know where the sugar bowl is.
Perhaps it's a conspiracy, but one designed for the good of the masses. Fruit growers are told by the grocery moguls to make the fruit look pretty but not to let it taste sweet.Then when the government goes on and on about Americans getting fatter and fatter the fruit growers and the grocery folks will have helped save the people from all sorts of horrible sugar-related diseases. Expect to see a slogan prominently posted in your supermarket soon: "Sour is Cool"...'Taste Our Deliciously Tasteless Watermelons". "Bland is Beautiful". Any of these may be the next ad copy writer's brainstorm in print. Maybe there's a Nobel prize for helping save people from sugar-filled nectarines.
Meanwhile-expect this to change but not so drastically that we will one day be buying "sweet lemons". Much more likely we'll get honesty in advertising: "Sour Peaches"..."Unsweet Cherries"..."Bland Melons." At least then we'll know in advance what we're buying and we'll remember to add sugar to our shopping list.