MEDIUM RARE
Just when you’re about to declare the start of a fruitarian diet, comes news that when you eat a sweet, ripe mango now, it will be like biting into gold.
In the palengke – not supermarket, where prices are a few pesos higher – mangoes have goldened from P270 a kilo to P350, a big jump in the last two weeks. A kilo of the regular sized fruit contains four pieces, or P87.50 per mango, quite a luxury. Hopefully, the monsoon rains will not add to the seasonal distress that manifests itself in black spots and other imperfections on the fruit’s epidermis.
Should fruitarians feel guilty? Not when they compare themselves with the meat eaters: a kilo of beef (sirloin) could easily fetch P600, equivalent to one day’s wages.
Additionally, red meat like pork takes longer to cook thoroughly and to digest, on top of which the consumer should feel some form of environmental guilt, whereas a fruit is easily picked off or falls from a tree already weighed down by its fruits. True, one mango does not a meal make, and a fruitarian, like a vegetarian, will need vitamins and proteins from other sources to make their meal nutritious.
Veggies and fruits – lovely to look at, so fresh, so alluring in their nice colors and shapes, with or without seeds, a favorite subject/object of painters and photographers! Not only do the leafy wonders and photogenic (if seasonal) fruits make great salads, snacks, and desserts, but with an increase in Meralco rates coming in October, eating them raw should be a welcome alternative to dishes that require boiling, baking, stewing, or frying.
This is the time for chefs and cooks to come up with recipes for meals that require little or no cooking. How hard is it to prepare a fruit-ful meal?
When was the last time you visited a weekend market in Metro Manila, if only to check out what’s available and what’s abundant, what’s cheap and not? On one such trip recently, when I saw a single rosy peach perched on a tray all by its lonesome, I could not walk away without my daughter getting the hint. Yes, she bought it for me, at one-third the price of a sirloin steak. (Guilty? Not really.)