Today in the supermarket I overheard a young man, in his early twenties
by the look of him, saying to his friends “I ate an apple the other day, for
the first time in my life”.
I can imagine that people can grow to twenty without eating specific
foods: growing up in a vegetarian family, for instance, and never tasting
meat until adulthood if at all. Or growing up Jewish or Muslim and never trying
pork. And many a friend of our daughters has had her first taste of Indonesian
food, home-baked bread, artichokes, venison, squid, seitan, pizza made from
scratch rather than being bought frozen, or even watermelon —all things
we don’t think particularly exotic or outrageous— in our house. But
apples! I buy them practically by the bushel (do apples come in
bushels?) because the girls can go through a kilo in one single day.
Aren’t apples a childhood staple? Didn’t he ever get apple sauce with a
children’s menu when he was small? Or did he, until now, only know bottled
apple sauce and vaguely realise that apples are what it’s made of, as most
people know bread is made from flour but don’t know what to do when faced with
actual flour?
Unfortunately I didn’t catch what he thought of the apple. I hope he liked
it.
