The best fruit doesn’t travel

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July-August 2018

FEEL ALMOST shy about writing this column. It

contains no revelations, no call to arms. No one

gets savaged: well, only mildly. The subject is

almost inconsequential. Yet it has become an

obsession which, at this time of year, forbids me

to concentrate for long on anything else.

Though we still subsist largely on junk, even bilious

old gits like me are forced to admit that the quality

and variety of most types of food sold in Britain has

improved. But one kind has deteriorated. You can buy

mangoes, papayas, custard apples, persimmons,

pomegranates, mangosteens, lychees, rambutans and

god knows what else. But almost all the fruit sold

here now seems to taste the same: either rock hard

and dry or wet and bland. A mango may be ambrosia

in India; it tastes like soggy toilet paper in the UK.

And the variety of native fruits on sale is smaller than

it has been for 200 years.

Why? Most people believe it’s because the super-

markets select for appearance not taste. This might

be true for vegetables, but for fruit it’s evidently

wrong. Green mangoes, Conference pears, unripe

Bramley, Granny Smith or Golden Delicious apples

look about as appealing as a shrink-wrapped stool.

Appearance has nothing to do with it. What counts to

the retailer is how well the variety travels.

Take the Egremont Russet, for example. It’s a small

apple that looks like a conker wrapped in sandpaper.

But it has one inestimable quality. It can be dropped

from the top of Canary Wharf, smash a kerbstone and

come to no harm. This means it can be trucked from

an orchard at Land’s End to a packing plant in John

O’Groats, via Sydney, Washington and Vladivostock,

then back to a superstore in Penzance (this is the pre-

ferred route for most of the fruit sold in the UK) and

remain ﬁt for sale. The supermarkets must have had

some trouble shifting it because of its strange

appearance, so they promoted it as a connoisseur’s

apple. Such is our suggestibility that almost ever yone

believes this, though a dispassionate tasting would

show you that it’s as sweet and juicy as a box of

Kleenex.

For the same reason, we are assaulted with Confer-

ence pears, most of which resemble some kind of

heavy ordnance, rather than any one of a hundred

exquisite varieties such as the Durondeau, Belle Julie,

Urbaniste, Glou Morceau, Ambrosia, Professeur du

Breuil or Althorp Crasanne. It is because these pears

are so delicious that they cannot be marketed. They

melt in the mouth, which means they would also melt

in the truck before it left the farm gate. As the best

pears, plums, peaches and cherries are those which

go soft and juicy when ripe, the grocers ensure that

we never eat them.

To compound the problem, the supermarkets

demand that fruit is picked long before it ripens: it

doesn’t sof ten until it rots. This makes great commer-

cial sense. It also ensures that no one in his right mind

would want to eat it. But, happily for the retailers, we

have forgotten what fruit should taste like. The only

way to ﬁnd out is either to travel abroad or (the low-

carbon option) to grow your own. I ﬁnd myself

becoming a fruit evangelist, a fructivist, whose mis-

sion is to show people what they are missing.

When I lived in Oxford, at a time when allotments

were underused, I spent a week in the Bodleian librar y

reading Hogg and Bull’s

Herefordshire Pomona

, a

massive book about apples and pears, written in the

A mango may be ambrosia in

India; it tastes like soggy toilet

paper in the UK

Shops focus

not on quality

or even

appearance

but on

varieties that

travel, so grow

your own

The best fruit

doesn’t travel

by George Monbiot

ENVIRONMENT

July-August 2018

6 1

1870s (you can now buy it on CD from the Marcher

Apple Network). Then I cleared two and a half plots

and planted the best varieties I could ﬁnd. I lef t just

as the trees were ready to fruit. But land here in mid-

Wales is cheap. I bought half an acre and have star ted

planting a second orchard.

When I ﬁrst tried to place an order, I caused great

excitement among the nurseries I phoned. Where had

I seen these apples? Who recommended them? Two of

them, I discovered, had been

extinct for at least 50 years. So

I have had to settle for second

best, by which I mean breeds

which still exist. I began by

planting a Ribston Pippin and

an Ashmead’s Kernel. These

apples, both exquisite when fully ripe, can be stored

from October till May. To spread the fruit as f ar through

the year as possible, I have ordered an apple called

the Irish Peach, which ripens in early August; a St

Edmund’s Pippin (September) and a Wyken Pippin

(December to April).

After a long search I think I have pinned down the

apple I once tasted and loved in a friend’s garden. I’m

pretty conﬁdent that it was a Forfar, also know as

the Dutch Mignonne, so I’ve bought one of those

too. If I’d had more space, I would also have planted

a Catshead, a Boston Russet, a Sturmer Pippin and

a Reinette Grise.

I have bought two pears – a Seckle and a Beurre

Rance – a green plum (the Cambridge Gage), a ﬁg, a

medlar, a peach, currants, gooseberries, raspberries,

loganberries and blueberries. But what excites me

most are the suggestions made by a man called Ken

Fern.

Once a London bus driver, Fern has spent most of

his life cataloguing and growing the edible species

of fruit and vegetable which can sur vive in this coun-

try. His list now extends to 7000, some of which are

featured in his book

Plants for a Future

. I’ve decided

to buy an Arnold Thorn (Crataegus arnoldiana), which

belongs to the same genus as the hawthorn, but

grows sweet juicy fruits the size of cherries, and to

replace my hedge with Eleagnus x ebbingei, which

produces sweet red berries with edible seeds, in

(uniquely) April and May. This means, if it works out,

that I can eat fresh fruit all the year round. I can

store apples and Beurre Rance pears until the Elea-

gnus fruits, then my strawberries should be ready

more or less when it stops. One day when I can

afford it I will buy more land and plant a few dozen

of the weird species Fern has found.

Most people have less space than I do, but even

a tiny garden can support half a dozen apple trees,

if you grow them as cordons (single stems with shor t

spurs) 80cm apart against a wall. If you have room

for only a couple of pots, you could grow blueber-

ries, strawberries, cranberries or some of the little

shrubs Ken Fern recommends, such as Vaccinium

praestans and Gaultheria shallon.

Or you could become a guerilla planter or guerilla

graf ter, growing fruit on roadsides, on commons and

in parks and wasteland. Apple twigs of any kind can

be grafted onto crab trees. Medlars and one breed

of pear (a delicious variety called Josephine des

Malines) can be grafted onto hawthorn. Kiwi fruit,

passion f ruit and a vine called Schisandra grandiﬂora

will climb into trees of any kind.

It’s not just the produce I love. When you start

growing fruit, you enter a world of recondite knowl-

edge, accumulated over centuries of amateur

experiments.

You must choose the right rootstocks and polli-

nators and learn about bees, birds and caterpillars.

But above all you must learn patience. Growing fruit

forces you to think ahead, to imagine a sweeter

future and then to wait.

Perhaps it is this, as much as the forgotten ﬂa-

vours, that I have been missing.

This article was ﬁrst published in The Guardian;

www.monbiot.com

The variety of native fruits on

sale is smaller than it has been

for 200 years