Big Apple, expensive apples and rotten apples

Big Apple is an appellation for New York City. Although some apple is grown in upstate New York and Long Island, New York is not apple country. Washing State is. I recall huge, big red apples made of cement in many parts of the state and it was a good advertisement for the great city. But it is of little import to me now, because I rarely go there.

Expensive apples are part of the rotten experience in Colombo. Apples are imported into Sri Lanka mainly from Australia and probably other places. Apples harvesting in Australia begins about this time, the end of summer. By the time they appear on supermarket shelves here, they are stale, dry and almost rotten. Now the newspapers say that apples are more expensive in Colombo than anywhere other than in the Big Apple. Given the higher rate of spoilage during transport and in the heat and humidity of Colombo, the price of a kilo of edible apple in Colombo is higher than anywhere on this side of paradise. But is it still forbidden in that place?

But why eat that rotten fruit, anyway? Because local fruits in the market outdoors or in supermarkets are equally rotten. Virtually all fruits, except beli, divul, kos, thurian, mangosteen and rambutan smell foul with carbide and taste worse. Avocado and grapefruit are available seasonally but 8 out of 10 fruits we buy are picked too early. If you buy 10 avocados for Rs.1,000, an edible avocado costs you Rs.500 each. Mangoes and ‘pera’ are picked early to save them from squirrels and birds, including bats. Loss of fruits at harvest, storage, packing and transport exceed the generally accepted 30%of total output of crops for food. The effective price of a few grams of edible fruit probably is higher in Colombo than in the Big Apple, again.

Rotten Apples are very common in Colombo but not cheap. Their net worth in money is in billions of US dollars and their negative worth to society is in trillions of rupees. They spoil the rest faster than corona spread from Wuhan to Beijing. Like the proverbial fox who found unreachable grapes sour, I find the unaffordable apples rotten.

Hazel Nut