On a recent visit to the supermarket, I found myself looking at a pack of fruit and becoming extremely upset. Among raspberries and blueberries, ghostly white strawberry. It was the complete opposite of all the strawberries I had ever seen. The ripe fruit had pale flesh with oozing red spots. Their seeds remind you of clogged pores that require nasal strips. Rattling, I wheeled the cart toward the less-than-forgettable produce.
I later learned that this little weirdo is a pineberry, a variety named for its subtle pineapple flavor but better known for its eerie coloration. When you slice it open, the inside is surprisingly white. These aren’t the only unusually colored fruits you’ll find in the produce aisle these days. Other strawberries have a pale yellow or cream blush, pink pearl apples have shocking magenta insides, and now there are kiwis that match every color of a traffic light. .can get yellow watermelon HEB pink pineapple instacart, pink raspberry and kroger.
Now is the time for unusual fruits. Unusual colors are “a clear trend in the produce sector,” Courtney Webber, a professor of plant breeding at Cornell University, told me. The color change may be accompanied by a subtle change in flavor, but the difference is primarily aesthetic.people don’t buy pink raspberry Because it tastes like peach. They buy it because it looks cool.
“Wrong” colored fruit is nothing new. Some are arkansas braapple, naturally occurring in nature. In other cases, breeders develop them by crossing fruits of different colors. But until now, these have not been distributed to supermarkets because growing them in the quantities needed to supply large chains is risky and expensive. Produce sold in big box stores typically has to be grown in large quantities, packed and shipped long distances, and sold quickly to avoid spoiling on the shelves. To meet all these conditions, breeders have developed the following hardy supermarket strongmen: gala apple, cavendish bananaand thompson seedless grapes. Breeding efforts are often aimed at bringing out attractive, uniform color, which is the main reason Red Delicious apples have become so popular.
Now things are getting weird. Breeders still use traditional techniques such as cross-pollination and grafting to produce fruit with specific traits, but advances in genomics are now making the process more efficient. “Once you understand how traits are inherited, it becomes easier to create the right combination of genes to get what you want,” Weber says. He used to purple strawberry; these days he’s been working on raspberry in shades like the sun.
The desire for strange fruits has led several large companies to invest in the development of new varieties. His Driscoll’s, the berry giant, developed pale yellow ‘Tropical Bliss’ and baby pink ‘Rosé’ strawberries after decades of in-house breeding.Fresh Del Monte took a different path: its coral meat “Pink Glow” Pineapple It has become genetically Designed to accumulate lycopene, the compound that turns tomatoes red. This fruit is only sold in a few retail stores in certain states (particularly not in Hawaii, which restricts pineapple imports).However, it was so popular that Fresh Del Monte recently proposed It is said that the company’s profits have increased thanks to pineapples.
You won’t find these strange fruits in any grocery store. These are stocked at some mid-priced stores. For example, Trader Joe’s sells it. pink meat orange— but they’re much more likely to be found at high-end grocery stores. At least for now, fruit innovation beyond ghostly berries and colorful kiwis is “on the horizon,” said Lauren M. Scott, chief strategy officer at the International Fresh Produce Association. To a lesser extent, the vegetable aisle has become kaleidoscope-like, with candy-striped beets, purple green beans, and cauliflower in shades of lavender, marigold, and lemon-lime. “People love new things, but they’re also creatures of habit,” Scott says. That is, they don’t want something like: too much new. For the average customer tired of plain old fruit, a pink apple has a lower barrier to entry than, say, a rambutan.
For consumers who stumble across them, the experience can be a tricky one. New colors may include more delicious fruits. Red kiwi is sweeter than the original tart green. But color shapes our expectations of taste, and oddly colored fruit can subvert those expectations in ways that are novel and exciting, if not nonsense. White strawberries look unripe but have no taste. People expect yellow watermelon to taste “like a banana popsicle,” Weber said, because yellow is usually associated with tropical flavors like citrus and pineapple. However, it tastes like watermelon. Similarly, yellow raspberries taste like raspberries, he said.
The golden age of golden raspberries occurred when advances in plant breeding coincided with a cultural obsession with aesthetics that produced the indigo Empress 1908 gin and the pastel nightmare that is the Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino. Color makes food fun, even if it doesn’t have any meaning. people do it for the gram— or at least to satisfy the same desire for visual excitement that social media fosters. I find white strawberries odd, but I have to admit that the fruit platter looks very chic.
Eventually, the grocery store blue banana And in the process, the strange fruit may change our fundamental notions of produce. If you ask an American child to draw an apple, he or she will draw a sketch of Red Delicious. They would paint the grapes purple. But maybe someday they’ll consider other colors because of what they see in the produce aisle. The supermarket of the future may seem fantastical, but it will bring us one step closer to nature. There, fruit color is much less predictable than perfect berries lined up like clams. Yes, white strawberries are weird. So is the fact that we expect all strawberries to be red.
