Peaches # 19-21: Peach Battle!

Today was hot in Boulder - so hot that the middle of the day felt like hot jello. Not very pleasant. But it's part of the joy of summer, I think, to be desperately hot: it gives you an excuse to laze around and do nothing while you wait for the heat to lift.

So, instead of watching TV or playing a video-game or something else productive, I ate one peach after another until the day got cooler. Today my three peaches were at the perfect ratio of squishiness. A day later and they'd have been peach soup. A day earlier and I would have wished I'd waited a day more.

I had two 'conventional' peaches and one 'organic' peach. You know, the whole organic movement is really taking off - especially in Boulder where it seems to be the height of fashion to eat socially conscious macrobiotic permaculture produce. Now, the proponents of organic food will inevitably recite a laundry list of different reasons for buying organic, ranging from rants about how pesticides are part of a system of patriarchal oppression to verbal flotsam how GMO food reduces our intake of Absolute Spirit. I stop listening whenever someone gets a that very earnest very spiritual glaze over their eyes that signifies the death of reason. I care about one thing, and one thing only: taste.

Now, the peaches looked different. The organic peach was about half as big as the conventional peaches, and its skin was more taught. I ate the organic peach first, and found its flesh to be quite solid. It tasted sweet and juicy, but the taste wasn't simply sweet: when you eat a really good peach, you can taste some bottom notes of flowers, or citrus. And this was towards the higher end of peaches.

Then I tried the conventional peaches. The big difference is that the flavor was far more diluted, almost watery. They were less sweet, less complex, and mushier. Now, normally I prefer mushy peaches, but I think only because it can be a sign of ripeness. Compared with the organic peach, these peaches were just sloppy. Oddly enough, the flesh was a yellowy red closer to the skin, which was nice aesthetically, but it didn't really add up to a great peach. All in all, the conventional peaches were just a little more boring than the organic peach: the organic peach had more depth, sweetness, and texture.

So, oddly enough, the hippies are right: Organic really does taste better.

Peach # 18: Organic Produce

American fruit, the general unwashed mass of American fruit, is bred more to look good than to taste good. Meant to cater to the supermarket shopper who is entranced by a large, deep red strawberry, or a big shiny green apple, it tends to taste more like cardboard than it does fruit. Because of this, fruit connoisseurs like myself tend to think that the smaller and uglier the fruit is, the more authentic it is, and the more tasty. If you doubt me, go down to your local farmer's market and pick up a pallet of organic strawberries - the smaller and uglier the better - and you'll find that a tiny strawberry only a little larger than the nail on your pinky has as much strawberry taste in it as one of those huge franken-berry strawberries that span a couple inches and taste, really, only like strawberry-flavored water.

Boulder is a hotbed of organic produce. I was in the local hippy-food store when I saw some small, organic peaches on sale. Always ready for a new peach experience, I took two.

I waited a little while for them to ripen, and actually forgot about them, until the flesh of the smaller of the two felt so loose that I was worried it would fall off. I prefer my peaches maybe a bit overripe, so I took a bite - with gusto.

While the skin was dangerously soft, the flesh itself had a lot more stability to it than I'd expected. Often with an overripe peach, when you take a bite into it it kinda just explodes all over the place. But this ugly little organic peach came with in-built structural integrity. The flavors were not too sweet, but pleasantly complex. There was even a hint of a sharp citrusy taste towards the end which was very pleasant. I ate it down to the pit and decided to give the second, larger peach, another day or two to ripen up.

But then, after a hard day at work, I picked up this second peach the next day, looking forward to something sublime, something wonderful, something that would encourage me to listen to classical music and wish I were a Christian. But I picked it up. And it was mushy, positively mushy. And more - it sported a nice coat of light white mold. Into the trash it went. I had been denied my peach.