Peaches are not my favorite fruit, but a fresh peach in August with a little milk and sugar is a delight not to be missed. I mean, I like strawberries and cherries more, but a nice ripe peach is a very special experience. I say this because the peaches sold in the grocery store during the rest of the year are horrific–wooden, tasteless, dry, bitter. They look perfect, but they are only a simulacrum of a real piece of fruit. I won’t have them in the house. As a child we would often have a lug of peaches or pears in the kitchen during the month of August, so we ate fruit morning, noon, and night. They were so juicy that I had to go outside to eat the fruit as the juice would run down my arm and drip off of my elbow. The fruit was sweet and juicy and wonderful. My question is this: why can’t the local grocery stores do that today? With a few exceptions, most all the fruit is harvested green, so that by the time it reaches the stores it looks good, but it doesn’t taste good. Peaches and pears are particularly vulnerable, but when was the last time you ate a tomato or a strawberry that was actually sweet? The strawberries look big and beautiful and red, but they are dry and bitter with only the ghost of a ripe strawberry lurking off in the distance as if it were a stranger in a strange country. And I get it: stores do not want to throw away overly ripe fruit everyday. They need as much shelf life as they can get or their profits go out in the trash. They won’t take a risk and let the fruit stay on the tree as long as possible because if they all do the same thing, the consumer has no choice but to either leave the “green” fruit in the stores or eat crappy tasting fruit. I find this corporate policy to be excellent business, but a poor policy. I leave the fruit in the store because it’s not worth taking home at any price, but I get the feeling that many people do take it home and try to eat it, and then they don’t complain, which puzzles me. I guess that many, many people just accept the nonsense that corporate America wants to sell them. If grocery stores could sell sweet peaches during August back in the sixties, why can’t they do it now? If it were only a question of effort, I would think that better trucking conditions would make transporting ripe fruit over long distances that much easier, but I don’t think it is a question of effort. I think it is a question of the bottom line. I suspect that lugs of peaches were a hook which stores used to get customers in the door. I doubt they made much money on the fresh peaches, but as people came in to get the peaches, they would also buy a lot of other things as well. So the peaches were a loser to get people in the door and spending money. In the meantime, we are offered bad fruit, hard peaches, and no alternatives. The peach is such a simple fruit–fuzz, flesh, juice, sugar–a hedonistic delight when served ripe.