More on blueberries

More from last summer ...

This morning I harvested blueberries. For lunch I had a tomato sandwich.

The tomato sandwich was made of two thick slices of tomato from a neighbor's garden (ours aren't ripe and she offered some of her surplus), two slices of whole grain bread and a bit of salt on the tomato.

It occurred to me that one of the deprivations in UniStatian society is the lack of true sensuality. I'll tell you what I mean.

A blueberry, to many people, seems to be a small blue nugget of flavored sugar. That is how it presents itself in pies, muffins and other manufactured products. There is a certain tickle of delight at the tinge of flavored fructose on the tongue if it can be sensed beneath the flood of glucose that surrounds it.

To me a blueberry is something quite different. It is a flutter of wings among the green leaves, the droop of the branches, their tips dragged down by the ripe globes. It is the feel of the fruit, warmed by the sunshine, the squelch between the fingers of a berry that's overripe or left unfinished by the birds.

It is the perfect combination of resistance and release provided by a ripe berry that lets you gently tug at a mixed cluster and open your hand to find only ripe ones.

It is the faintest tinge of bitterness on the dusty skin, the sun-warm feel of the berry in the mouth, the resistance of the skin as you gently bite down and the sweet explosion of taste as the skin ruptures and the center of your nervous system becomes your tongue.

To many people a tomato is a slightly fruity component of a salad, or a container for some other food.

But there is a special smell to the leaves of a tomato plant. It is a pungent, pleasant smell that dissipates quickly. It is part of the taste of a tomato fresh from the garden that is missing from those that are shipped from distant farms. The flavor is too evanaescent to survive and no amount of seasoning can replace it.

So many people these days have as their only experience of tomatoes, the trip to the chill supermarket and the stacks of red balls falsely dewed by a fog system to appeal to our instincts and make us believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that these foods are fresh.

They have missed the game of hide and seek among the leaves, the atavistic fear of a sudden hornworm, the waiting for ripening, the smell of the earth.

What is the sensual life today ... deodorized, chemically ripened vegetables displayed in a cold warehouse overwhelmed with the odor of rotting things and the tang of metal and chlorine.