You’re not supposed to travel that much, but suddenly, heaven knows why, you find yourself in Greece, in a remote village in the Peloponnese, where you still brush your teeth with ouzo. In terms of tourism, the place is a failure, there is no hotel, certainly not a nightclub, but at least a supermarket. It’s the size of a 1,200-euro student shack in Munich, less than 20 square meters, and stuffed to the ceiling with canned goods, sacks of rice, wine, pasta, detergent, actually with everything you need to live.
Fruit and vegetables are stored outside, as is the dog, several cats and an Ottoman-era kitchen chair. But what kind of strange fruits are these, the police should intervene! Despite all the EU norms, the tomatoes are not even remotely round; one is shaped like a turnip, the other has wrinkles and a nose, and they’re not as appetizingly plastic red as the standard tomatoes at home. And what do the peaches look like? They are big, but the skin is mottled and the flesh is as soft as if they were ripe. How? Ripe fruit? They’re completely behind the moon here.
We bought peaches anyway, and a few of the wrinkled tomatoes too. They came on the table in the evening, and we felt like the philosopher Leibniz when he first baked his famous biscuits. Wow, what a revelation! So this is how tomatoes taste in the best of all possible worlds. They actually have an aroma, something between fruity and divine.
We have never, not once, received such tomatoes in Munich, neither at the Viktualienmarkt nor from the neighbor who grows a variety on her balcony that is a direct descendant of the tomatoes that the conquistador Cortés brought to Spain from the Aztec Empire has. And then these peaches: They were so juicy that you could only eat them on the beach in your swimming trunks. “The peach glows reddish in the leaves,” wrote the poet Georg Trakl – and that’s exactly how the fruit from the village shop in the Peloponnesian satyr country tasted after shimmering sunny days in the kingdom of Pan.
A Munich fruit stand lady recently shook her head indignantly when asked whether her peaches could be eaten right away and stated with a sharp undertone that she only sells fresh fruit that still has to ripen for a day or two. That’s right, we had completely forgotten in Greece: immaturity is a quality feature in the fruit sector. No fruit should have the chance to ripen on the tree and unfold its aroma, and that works great. An industrially grown peach is so tasteless that you can confidently chop it into the cucumber salad. Nobody will notice. As well as?
Young people have never experienced what the fruit really tastes like, and the older ones have forgotten. You only get an idea of the former variety of flavors in areas that are far away from the hunting grounds of the market economy. The fruits that grow there show that the farmer has no clue about industrial cultivation and export-oriented harvests. They taste heavenly.