This past week, one of my children came home for a long and lovely visit.  After years living several states away, and many months since his last visit, this time he had brought a friend.  In contrast to previous visits, however, the cupboard was unfortunately and embarrassingly bare.  We went shopping.

It was when we arrived home that we realized there had been an important change in the way we unpacked our groceries in recent years.  This was a change that had had a significant, though virtually invisible, effect on the way we ate.

As my son opened the refrigerator door and began to slide food onto the shelves and into the drawers, I lifted away the bags of fruit and began to spread them out all over the kitchen counters.  We had bought a beautiful assortment that included plums, kiwis, melons, mangos, peaches, and even a coconut.

That’s when I realized that I rarely put fruit in the refrigerator anymore.  Instead, I spread it out, often on a dish towel, to give each piece enough space to breath while keeping it from causing all the other fruit to ripen too fast.

It’s counterintuitive, but it works.  In contrast to what you might think, much less is wasted because you can always see what’s ripe, what’s good, and what’s left.  It greatly increases the likelihood of eating fruit for breakfast, for a snack, for dessert.  It guarantees that little or nothing gets forgotten in the back corner of a drawer.  It allows us to pick the ripest, readiest, sweetest-looking peach as soon as we walk through the kitchen.  The food on the counter turns out to be so appealing that folks engage in less of what I call “cruising the cabinets.”

In a way, it’s similar to the layout of a grocery store.  Produce first.  No supermarket puts the produce in a back corner.  Not a chance!  Each and every shopper is actually required to walk straight through the produce section on their way to the rest of the store, and it’s pretty much the same everywhere.  

Berries get eaten especially quickly of course, and if I soak them briefly in water with a bit of vinegar like I described in a previous post, they will last a few days no matter where I put them.   

Of course we put the melon in the refrigerator when we’re ready to cut it up and eat it.  We’ll move fruit into the refrigerator if we’re going out of town for a couple of days.  And I’ve been known to put a very ripe peach (sliced in half) or banana (peeled) into the freezer for use later in a smoothie.  Sometimes I also collect a few ripe pears and boil them down into pear sauce with an apple or two.  But those are the exceptions. In general, you can count on being able to find something sweet and delicious on our kitchen counters.  In fact, I haven’t heard any complaints this week.