Cherries Were Sweet, Wormy, and Juicy

It is high season for cherries, and I find them every time I go to the grocery store. They are red, plump, juicy, and quite expensive. But none as expensive as we found them in June in Calgary, Canada, a farming town. I asked the locals why their cherries were 26 Canadian dollars a kilogram and was told that there was a shortage; the crop was smaller because the weather had been colder than usual, and cherries need heat to ripen.

So much for the non-stop global warming drivel and the need to eliminate CO2 from any human activity by 2030. Yet plants and trees need CO2 to grow, it is the gas of plant life. Nurseries add extra CO2 in their green houses in order to grow plants much faster. And we exhale CO2.

I did not purchase the expensive cherries in Calgary although I was tempted. I reached for their compostable grocery bags and then I decided against buying them and bought apples instead.

Our local Wegman’s carries cherries from California most days for $2.99 per pound and organic or yellow ones for $6.99 per pound. Even at the price of $12.99 per pound, they flew off the shelves in early June. Locals, government bureaucrats who inhabit this area, can afford to pay high prices for everything – apartments, gas, high-end EVs like Tesla, and very expensive homes.

I filled my bowl with red cherries and took them on the deck; they glistened in the sunlight in rich hues of ripened red. Within minutes a bee appeared out of the nowhere, attracted by the fruity fresh scent.

As I ate one and the fruit released its sweet juice, I was reminded of my childhood cherries, infested by fruit flies with their worms. They crawled inside the fruit and burrowed their eggs. We ate them anyway, we were so starved for fresh fruits and vegetables.

My friend Joe K., who served a while at the Embassy in Bucharest, told me the story of one Friday evening, when several friends gathered at his home to watch a VHS movie and he picked up a large bag of cherries which he placed on the kitchen table. As his wife went into the kitchen to bring the guests bowls of cherries, Joe heard a scream. He ran to the kitchen to check on his wife and found her staring grossed out at the kitchen table now crawling with hundreds of white worms which had emerged from the bag of cherries.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember ever eating a fruit, any fruit, during my childhood in communist Romania that was not burrowed inside by worms. Cherries in June and July were sweet, wormy, and juicy, and we ate them anyway.

I feel privileged and extremely lucky to live in this country where I can eat fruits free of fruit flies and their worms, especially cherries, apples, peaches, and prunes. 

Yet one day, I was in Shoppers in Fairfax, Virginia, and the cherry stand was buzzed by fruit flies and did not smell very well. I did not purchase any and left the store immediately, extremely disappointed. The abundance we used to experience once is no longer the same all over America.

Wormy Banana (a repost)

My 80-year old mom is sitting at the kitchen table dissecting a banana as if it was a biology specimen under a microscope. I watch her for a few minutes intently before I ask her what she is doing. With a scientific look of Eureka discovery on her face, she tells me, she is looking for worms. Worms? She is 100 percent sure; the bananas I just bought at the grocery store have worms, especially since they had ripened enough to be extra sweet and mushy. She is peeling away and separating the banana core into smaller segments, believing that the tiny white fibers are worms.

I started to explain that they do not, but I stopped short. Mom spent most of her adult life in the Eastern European block where fruit flies were rampant and uncontrollable. Insecticides such as DDT, although banned in this country, were used on most crops and vegetables low to the ground, but it was difficult to spray powder on fruit trees in order to kill the pests that loved fruits as much as we did. Crop dusting by aerial spraying was not something the communist regime did. There was plenty manual labor around. The population needed employment in spite of the meager wages. Workers dusted or sprayed the chemicals themselves without masks or any protection for that matter.

I do not remember ever eating a fruit that did not have worms in it. Fruit flies deposited their eggs that grew into tiny, white worms that wiggled out of cherries, apples, pears, prunes, peaches, apricots as we took bites out of them. We could try to extricate the worms by cutting the fruit into sections without parasites in them, or could just eat it whole and unwashed, not worrying or thinking about the worms. They constituted, after all, extra protein, and we were starved for protein all the time. We were not vegetarians by choice. Meat was so hard to find except at Christmas time when country folks slaughtered pigs and the government supplied stores in town with extra meat in order to pacify the starving urban proletariat.

There were a few orchards slated for communist elite consumption or export and those were tended to carefully. The fruit was whole and untouched by parasitic fruit flies.

During Christmas holidays, small shipments of oranges and bananas came from Greece, Israel, and people fought over them in long lines at the state grocery store. Such rare delicacies were rationed to a few pieces per family. We were so excited to get the exotic fruits and free of worms!

There were no 10 pound bags of oranges similar to those we buy at Sam’s Club and no neat rows of perfect oranges or bunches of bananas like those that we find in American grocery stores every day. We take the abundance for granted because we have never experienced shortages of anything. We trust that whatever we need, will always be there, someone will grow them and ship them to our markets. But will they?

Mom finished her inspection of the “imperfect” banana. She threw it out with a huff, convinced that it had worms. Mom is blessed to have plenty of other food or fruits to satisfy her hunger. By the grace of God and a stroke of good luck, she lives in the land of plenty. She does not have to worry about her next meal. She has the luxury of throwing away good food that she mislabels wormy, tainted, or rotten. After all, there is so much food in this country and so cheap. Will we always be so lucky and have this luxury forever?