Too Many F#(%!+& Apples

Just as we discussed shortage as a driving force of creativity, abundance has a way of making people innovative, too.  And, also as discussed before, my motivation for writing this cookbook was to point out that we, those of us who are lucky enough to have been born privileged, are weirdly in awe of most foods that are considered peasantry in much of the world (especially in Italy - see section on Pizza).  The historical scarcity and difficulty of growing or raising our food made stretching meats, fish, and vegetables with the miracle of starches caused the explosion of humankind.  Fruit is kind of an oddball exception from the perspective of scarcity.  Fruits generally grow in wild abundance on a single plant but their delicacy and far faster tendency to spoil makes.  In order to preserve fruits we tend to add tons of sugar to them and store them in jars - once again, a processing procedure that adds a MASSIVE amount of calories and seems wildly inefficient and unnecessary in today's world.  We have airplanes now.  We can ship fruits from Chile to the US in a day on refrigerated cargo planes so that you can get cherries in the dead of winter.  The idea that we should only eat what is available locally in order to be uber-efficient is a bit misplaced, in my humble opinion.  I live in Chicago and it's winter right now, so pretty much the only thing that would be available in the way of food would be raccoon and squirrel (for good recipes for raccoon and squirrel refer to a pre-1960's copy of The Joy of Cooking).  I think jellies, jams and pies ARE FAR LESS EFFICIENT for the planet than crating up bananas from Tobago and selling them in London, but again, it's all about your perspective, and this is my book.

My advice from the perspective of nutrition is, once again, to eat FRESH, WHOLE fruits, however, wherever, and whenever you can get them as per the proportions in the first chapter of this book.