By Natalie Smith
When the black plastic cart with a TV on it rolled into the classroom, my fellow elementary school classmates and I started to fill with excitement and little whispers dispersed throughout the group of us. We were a group of children sitting on the floor in front of the cart with the lights turned out when the TV turned on and showed us a video about Johnny Appleseed. Like the quintessential American apple pie, Johnny Appleseed is also a signifier of American culture, especially when you are young. Like America was built by Europeans stealing this land from Indigenous people, Johnny Appleseed went around planting apple seeds to take over the land for a non-native fruit.
The most popular apple orchard in town is up on a mountain, easy to point out from down below in town by its telephone towers at the very top. Picking apples up there puts you in the heat, perhaps because up on a mountain, you are closer to the sun by just enough to be noticeable. Apple trees are not tall enough to cause much shade, especially when planted in straight rows and rows and rows. You’d expect to smell sweet apples when up there, but what you smell instead is sour vinegar. Rotten apples becoming apple cider vinegar on the ground, surrounded by flies. The ones not deemed good enough to be picked by customers, the ones that were too high for many to pick, the ones whose time of perfect ripeness was not seen. And so they fell, growing sour about their fate on the hardened soil.
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The one and only time I had starfruit was at a Girl Scout summer camp back in late elementary or early middle school. The park that it was held at featured a sunny field and a pavilion in a more forested area, and one of those temporary white tents was set up near the parking lot between the two. It was there where I tried starfruit, just a slice of it, in the shade of the tent. The other girls in my age group had come up with a theme song for our group. We called ourselves the Dashing Dolphins and the song went, “We will, we will / rock you down / shake you up / like a volcano will erupt / everyone knows that we’re the best / so let’s put the Dashing Dolphins to the test.” As I ate the yellow star outlined in greenish tint, they sang these lyrics to a rhythm based off of Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” I don’t remember the flavor, just the moment. But I do remember liking the fruit, as well as the song.
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Fresh pineapple is superior to canned pineapple. And the best way to have pineapple is to cut it up and mix it with fresh cut strawberries. The combination comes from my mom via my grandmother. I do not know if my grandmother realized the brilliance of the two combined herself or if it was recommended to her. But there’s something about the way that the pineapple juice makes the strawberries more juicy and how the mellowness of the strawberries tames the acidity of the pineapple. It tastes sweeter than either on their own. And when my parents decide to buy a pineapple and cut it up for this, I will eat the fruit until the yellow fibers make my tongue and lips sting a little. Oh, the joys of acidity.
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My sister bought a dragon fruit for the hell of it. And that’s how we learned that even though the outside is a hot pink and green on the inside, the inside is actually white with the seeds dispersed throughout as black dots. A bright, scaly dragon on the outside, but a dalmation on the inside. We weren’t expecting the taste either. To best describe it, the taste is mild. It’s a little sweet but not overbearing in the slightest. In fact, for some, it might even be underwhelming in taste. Dragon fruit is a fierce dragon with the heart of an old, loyal dog.
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My controversial ranking of melons would be cantaloupe > honeydew > watermelon. I just don’t like watermelon. I don’t like the idea of having to spit out seeds, I don’t like how hard they are to cut open, but most importantly, I do not like the taste. The red flesh is a glorified, solidified version of water, but sour on occasion and never quite sweet enough to peak my interest. The only time I had a good enough watermelon was one that I had while being babysat by a mother of five back in fifth grade. Maybe it was riper than normal or something, but that one was particularly sweet. No watermelon I have tried since then has been up to par. Watermelon artificial flavoring is even worse — I will give you all of my watermelon jolly ranchers if you could please give me cherry or grape in its place.
Some people say that cantaloupe and honeydew taste the same, and although they are similar, cantaloupe is more likely to taste sweet than the honeydew you buy at stores. Cantaloupe is less of a risk than honeydew. The mellow orange beats the mild green.
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I remember back in elementary school when we started learning about Greek mythology for the first time, I wanted to try a pomegranate so badly. Pomegranate is tied to Persephone and her descent to the underworld as Queen and wife to Hades. I wanted to know what made this fruit special. So, at some point, I convinced my parents to buy one. And when we opened the magenta shell, the inside was filled with little seeds surrounded in bubbles of juice, not unlike those weird fruit juice poppers that you can put as a topping at frozen yogurt places like Sweet Frog. I think that the first time, I did not know the seeds were edible, so I would pop each one in my mouth and spit out the seeds. I know now to just crunch on the seeds as part of the experience. Pomegranates are a fruit that require effort to eat.
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We had red-stained fingers and a bowl of pits and woody stems as my dad, Keyu, and I watched a Korean drama together this past summer. Some cherries were more tart, some were more sweet, but the consensus was that they were good and we did not want to stop eating them. I tend to avoid cherries because I do not like pitted fruits that tend to make a mess when I eat them. But this summer, my dad kept on buying them and I was reminded of how much I enjoy their taste.
I was introduced to the Shirley Temple drink before I was introduced to the actress that is its namesake. Maraschino cherries juice (which I only recently learned is called grenadine) mixed with sprite drunk at Chili’s with their old plastic kids cups colored with the same chili pepper based characters on the kids menus. Although I like maraschino cherries in that way, my mom and I always ask for no cherry when we order milkshakes from the Chik-fil-A drive thru. They don’t match the flavor of the cookies and cream or chocolate that we are getting, instead just a red stain on the otherwise lovely whipped cream.
Natalie Smith 