Thursday, July 3, 2008

Genetically modified 'Organic' fruits!

Everytime I go to Whole foods, I usually spend most of the time oggling at the vast collection of cheeses, pickled olives, fish and variety of ready-to-eat food items. However, today I visited Whole foods with my parents with an intent to show them all the wonderful organic produce and other things they carry. I love looking at the bamboo plates and colorful serving sets and crumpled 100% cotton clothes.
As I walked through neatly stacked piles of colorful fruits, I started noticing that I did not know names of more than half the fruits there. Every time I picked up something, I would look at the label and try to correlate what I picked with the name written below. To make things more complicated, most of the fruits were kept at multiple places while the labels were somewhere else. Anyways, I suddenly remembered the advertisement I had been hearing about 'Black Velvet' on the radio which said that Raileys was the first to carry those. Apparently its a mix of velvety apricot crossed with juicy plum. For a moment, I was really proud to have recognized it and enthusiastically explained to my parents what it was. But my enthusiasm soon started to morph into utter surprise and disbelief as I bumped into Peacharines, Mango nectarines, Pluots and the names I dont remember anymore. Just when I had gotten over the bright red bell pepper and its beautiful orange siblings, I ran into big all white eggplant and white asparagus! Not that I have not eaten genetically altered foods before but this was the first time it hit so hard. Probably because of the irony between it being 'organic' AND 'genetically engineered'. To me, 'organic' means as close to natural as possible. The good part is that I am no longer worried about not knowing names of half the fruits. I dont care anymore!
In the picture is Mango nectarine and black velvet.

2 comments:

Marlyn said...

Don't you think there is a difference between a hybrid, cross pollinated fruit and a genetically altered one? Maybe I'm being naive but I've been loving my apriums! Like a pluot but closer to the apricot than the plum...

Renuka said...

I dont know which ones are cross polinated vs altered. I love all the variations. I just cant keep up with those... KWIM?