Good Grief!

Produce Talk
I recently received a fax from my produce supplier:

Extremely cold and rainy weather in California has caused disruptions in the supply of many vegetables and some fruit items. This will cause some occasional out of stocks and some higher retails. We apologize for the inconvenience and anticipate that this situation will persist for at least a couple of weeks. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

• Bananas, cantaloupes, and pineapples: down in Costa Rica and Panama, rain has been a huge problem. Fields are still under water as I write this.
• Lettuce: problems at the moment because of cool wet weather has hampered the harvests during the past week, pushing prices much higher. Drier, warmer weather is forecasted during the next week or two and should help bring the prices back down if there is not much crop damage.
• Tomatoes are so plentiful in Florida that the prices have come down. It’s not just a supply and demand issue; many consumers got so fed up with the high prices that they decided to live without tomatoes. The product from Florida looks like tomatoes but is often grown for stability and the ability to travel long distances to you kitchen table. Remember, it is only 6 more months until the first Jersey tomatoes arrive!

Trivial Information

Tangier holds the birthplace of the name tangerine. The tangerine was named after the ancient Moroccan port city of Tangier. Although cultivated for over 3,000 years in China, mandarin oranges did not reach Europe and North America until the nineteenth century. Morocco has a great citrus industry (oranges, lemons, limes and clementines to name a few), but the small Mandarin oranges we call tangerines today were first imported from China to Tangier and then exported to other parts of Europe. Since nobody could articulate the Chinese name for the fruit, these tiny citrus from China simply became known as tangerines.

Have a fruitful week!