Fruit Salad Stories

The Only Fruit You Should Be Eating This Autumn — If You Don’t Want to Die!

Why the apple is the big cheese

I hate bananas.

Just seeing one of those phallic yellow fruits makes me want to reach for the bowl. That sickly sweet smell you get when you peel back that leathery skin is horrible. Like opening the lid of a six-month-old yoghurt.

Just look at them! Vomit-o-rama!

And it’s not just bananas. Most fruits irritate me. Why would you eat an orange if you could bite into an apple? And what’s the point in a pineapple with all those nasty spiky leaves.

If someone gave me one as a present, and I didn’t know what it was, I’d think, what the fuck is this? I’ve just cut my hand on it. You may as well have handed me a razor blade. And if I wanted a Hawaiian pizza, I’d go to the store and buy a can of pineapple rings.

Other stupid fruits include kiwis, avocados, mangos, grapefruit, and the stupidest fruit of all time: The Pomegranate.

Well that looks nice — like a blood clot.

I once worked in a café where the dumb clown chef insisted he wanted pomegranate seeds for a new smoothie he was experimenting with. So there I was picking out seeds for half the day with a pin. Only for the smoothie to taste like raspberry Slush Puppie.

Then there are berries.

I stayed at my cousin’s a few weeks ago. His family are superheroes and have things like rowing machines in their garden instead of barbecues. And collect gym memberships like other people collect supermarket coupon codes.

‘We mainly eat berries for breakfast,’ he informed me on my first morning.

Oh, fuck!

My worse fear. Berries for breakfast.

‘Stone Age Man ate them,’ my cousin’s wife pompously commented. ‘And if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us.’

Really?

I wanted to remind her that early Stone Age Man was perpetually on the brink of extinction through disease, attack, and lack of food. No one lived past the age of fifty, and if you did, you’d probably die in an abandoned cave alone.

Or perhaps she was referring to the sanitized version, like in The Flintstones, where prehistoric man fucked off in the morning to hunt mammoth, leaving the women at home to gather berries.

A nice story. Except in reality, they probably had berries for two months of the year, if they were lucky. The rest of the time, they lived off rotting meat, bonemeal, and dried grass.

So much for the Paleo diet, eh?

So I’m sitting round my cousin’s breakfast table surrounded by a global assortment of supermarket-packaged berries from God knows where: blueberries from Chilli, loganberries from Zambia, mulberries from Peru, wildberries from Kenya, and fucking Açaí berries from Namibia.

It’s like a potted history of Globalization right there on the plate. The only thing that’s missing is a Picked With Child Labour logo embossed on the packets.

I politely asked if they had an apple. The family looked at me like I’d flopped my cock out onto the table.

‘An apple?’ my cousin’s daughter replied, like it was a disease.

‘You know, those things that grow on trees,’ I replied jokingly, but it came out too sarcastic: ‘The things that grow on trees, you stupid fucking child!’

‘We’ve got a banana,’ she responded.

I nearly vomited over the patterned table cloth and embroidered place-mats. But held it in.

‘They give me indigestion,’ I replied. ‘It’s OK. I like berries. Mmm.’

It was only afterwards that the daughter brought me two shrivelled-up apples that reminded me of my grandfather’s testicles that I once saw when he fell out of bed after a dream about the war.

I thanked her, bit into one, and pretended to like it. Even if it was like biting into a sock.

I’m kind of picky about the apples I eat.

This is me holding a Reinette de Montfort apple — an old variety from the 19th century. If you’ve ever bothered to read me before, you’ll know I work on a dairy/cider farm in Normandy. It’s why I like apples, don’t have berries for breakfast, or any other fruit as a matter of fact.

I don’t work for the apple industry. But if you’re going to eat a piece of fruit, I would suggest an apple.

It works great as a snack and it’s incredibly good for you. Plus, you can make cakes with it, bake it, put it in stews, fry it, purée it, make baby food from it, juice it, ferment it, and — best of all — get pissed on it.

Can you do that with a banana?

No.

I rest my case.

Thanks for reading this fruity piece. For more bananas, check out:

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