{ Wednesday, September 23, 2009 } 12:03 AM

Diabetic Fruits

I am so happy with myself for giving this post such a fantastic title.

This came about when I went to NTUC Fairprice with my parents on Saturday to compare prices for some stuff that I need to buy for my birthday celebration. The first section that we would always pass by is the fruits section. My dad loves fruits, and he would always pester my mum to buy watermelons. This time round, he didn't. Instead, he wanted to buy honeydews.

Honeydews! How long have we not had honeydews at home? It has always been dragonfruits, oranges, watermelons, apples... Finally! Something I would eat. So Dad walked over to the honeydews produced somewhere in South East Asia, which cost $2 plus each. They didn't look pretty, and my mum was dissauding my dad from buying them. I looked beside me and there was this carton full of USA-produced honeydews that cost $5.50 each. I was like, "There are honeydews over here too, and they are from USA!" thinking that my mum would never buy them because of the price. I mean, who eats such expensive honeydews on normal occasions? And the problem with me is that I would always think that imported products are of higher quality. Like how New Zealand kiwis and Taiwan king mangoes would taste better, how Korean mushrooms are worth buying...

And to my surprise, Mum allowed Dad to choose a honeydew! OMG! I decided not to remind my mum about the price.

We went back home, and while my mum was cutting the honeydew into half for easy storage, I decided to take a piece out of the cut ones and oh man, have you any idea how SWEET they are? It's like drinking sugar solution! The thing is, you can just remove a very thin layer of the skin and the flesh near the skin is sweet too! I quickly stopped myself after a few pieces. That's how sweet it is. Mum was astonished at how sweet honeydews can ever be (actually, we all were) and commented that paying $5.50 for A honeydew is actually quite worth it.

I then thought about the South African apples I ate a few days before. They were so sweet, you don't even taste the malic acid found in apples. That means, the apples didn't taste like apples! It's like biting into some fresh fibre and drinking sugar solution... And my thoughts drifted further away, to how farmers try to produce sweet fruits so consumers would buy them. Watermelons, mangoes, oranges, etc, they are all sweet. Do you still remember when you last tasted sour oranges? I know some fruits are meant to be a little sweet, like the watermelons I mentioned just now, but in the past, the sweetness was something so natural, like the sweetness of dew drops, sweetness which came with a smell of nature. Now, fruits are so sweet that they taste like sugar solutions, that they don't taste like fruits anymore. They kinda lost the fruity fragrance which was characteristic of them. Although I have to admit that somehow, I wouldn't have liked my USA-honeydew so much if it wasn't that sweet. Just what did they do during the farming process? Water the crops with sugar solution?

Oh, that led me into thinking, perhaps we should further reduce each servings of fruit because of the high sugar content. Diabetic patients should probably even abstain from fruits. Ha. I'm being nonsensical again.

I still love the USA-honeydew. I hope Mum would buy one more!