things europe does better: fruit

If you know me, you may know how I feel about fruit. Or you may not, because this is one of those things that most people would try to avoid going around talking about too much. I am a big fan of fruit. Like, seriously. Like I could eat fruit three times a day and never feel like it was too much, partly because there quite possibly more fruits in the world than there days in a year. Since I was maybe thirteen one of my major life goals was to eat every kind of fruit there is.

I thought this was going pretty well, until I got here. Americans, you may not realize this, but your country is bad at fruits. This was a revelation to me. A revelation totally obscured by the variety of fruits suddenly available to me. Let us not expound on the ways that fruits became even more awesome when I got to France.

1. Plums. What, you say, we have plums in America. Yes, we do. But we do not have these plums. Our plums don't have names like Reine Claudes or Mirabelles. And while this might seem like by-any-other-name territory I'm venturing into, believe me, there is a difference. I'm not sure what it is. But a Mirabelle is not a "strangely tiny yellow plum." It is a Mirabelle, and it is probably grown in the gardens of magical fairies and then if you eat one you can never go back to the human world, and I ate a tart made of them. Sorry, humans.

2. Figs. I said this one before in my General Food Post, but I am going to reiterate. I had never eaten a fig before I got here, mainly because I had never actually encountered a fig before. I remember, as a child, reading a short story in a Highlights magazine in which a kid visits his grandfather and they have mundane male-bonding adventures like drinking buttermilk (?) and eating figs, which is apparently a male-specific activity, the reason given being that "girls don't like figs because they're weird and squishy." Figs, not girls. Though from my experience the description fits the girls better.

Anyway, I remember finding that oddly fascinating, because I had never seen a fig, and it was tricky for my mind to come up with a fruit so unpleasant that an entire gender would reject it. As it turns out, whoever wrote that story was just a crazy person because figs are neither squishy nor unpleasant, though my mother did once describe them as "weird." They are like mulberries except huge, and except for the fact that fig sap is mildly irritating and once when I ate one without washing it my lips were somewhat numb for the rest of the day.

3. Juice. I love juice (I'm pretty sure everyone does), and being here is making me suddenly realize just how limited the juice selection is in most US stores. Apple. Cranberry. Grape. Orange, tangerine, grapefruit, orange-tangerine, orange-tangerine-pineapple. And maybe one lonely pomegranate. I remember wondering why nobody made peach juice, or straight pineapple juice. But here it's another thing entirely. Apricot! (apricots are everywhere for some reason) Kiwi! (a freakish green color that I haven't tried yet but am looking forward to) Apple-raspberry-lychee! Something called "seasonal fruits" which had a picture of a fig and a pear on the front! Boggles the mind.

4. Applesauce. Well, this probably doesn't count so much, because the applesauce was pretty much applesauce, I don't think there's a lot of room for error. But: applesauce in little juicebox-type pouches that you suck out through a tube! I can't decide if I feel like a five-year-old or an astronaut. Also, once I came home and my host father was like, "Oh, hi, I made applesauce." As if it was something that you just do once in a while. Maybe it is, I have no idea, but it was pretty awesome.

So there you have it. In addition to bread and cheese, I now have fruit to be mildly disappointed about when I get back home. Do you think a fig tree would grow in Maryland?