Grocery stores are heaped with delicious, imported fruit. Kiwi, French pears, Japanese apples, strawberries in February, mangoes three-at-a-time. Not to mention fruit juices! You might be eating at McDonald's twice a day (as my younger son admitted he did during college) while eating piles of fruit, and fool yourself that you're eating healthfully. Wrong. Too much fruit is still too much sugar unless you're an athlete. And you have to wonder how much fossil fuel it took to fly those grapes from Chile. When I tracked my grocery spending back in 2002, fruit was at the top! You can be spending a dollar per serving without noticing.
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New June 9, 2010 California
Strawberries
Grist
has an article on the new fumigant they're using to sterilize the
soil on mega strawberry farms. They're
asking for people to call their government to change the policy. My
comment:
Well, I
hope that works. Myself, I haven't bought California strawberries in
decades. Strawberry season is a special time. It's great to set a day
aside to visit a pick-your-own ecological farm and fill some baskets.
Then go home and freeze, dry, or make jam with them. I just used the
last of 2009's berries last week. In a few weeks it will be time to get
on my knees again. Strawberries are a special, fleeting and fugitive
fruit. Is it any wonder draconian measures must be taken to have them
magically appear in produce departments all year? It's one of many
things we never should have taken for granted. Wake up and smell the
poison!
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A sensible and healthy serving of fruit is half a cup,
or a small fruit, or half a large one, or a quarter cup of dried fruit.
Three of these half-cup servings a day follows the 5 a Day CDC plan.
Here's where fruit fits into the 10 in 10 Diet:
Breakfast |  |
Lunch Home-canned fruit Half a cup of fresh fruit (local or in season), canned or frozen, with some plain yogurt, or alone= 1 serving Dried fruit
in bygone times was meant to be stewed and eaten with a spoon when
fresh fruit was out of season. It's easy to cover some dried prunes or
apricots with boiling water and simmer for a few minutes. Store in a
jar in the fridge. Cheaper than canned fruit, better for your teeth
than eating it dry. Frozen fruit and jam |   |
I hit the organic strawberry U-pick farm on the first day. The photo above is my 20 quarts. With this I made 42 cups of beautiful (Certo light recipe) jam and canned them in a boiling water bath so I don't have to worry about using them up quickly. I costed this jam out, incuding the gas to get to the farm: $1.00 a cup. The homemade-style imported jam my mother gets is $4.50 for ten fluid ounces. Then I froze the rest whole on two serving trays, so they can stay loose in bags. They can be chopped up frozen and put in muffins, etc.
Supper |  |
Eat extra fruit when it's in season and cheap. In the winter eat quick breads, and fruit as in bygone days – local apples that keep all winter, dried fruit, and canned fruit (but not shipped from, say China or Africa – read can labels carefully!)
Canning Fruit Baking - Yes you can! Oatmeal Porridge
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