Fruits and Veggies

A view in my fridge

One of my favorite things about Albania is all the fresh fruit and vegetables. We’ll go shopping and constantly be amazed at the quality and price of the food. A hangover from Ottoman times, you can find huge shopping bazaars and food tregus that are full of people, colors and life. Shopping is a social event and the vendors remember our faces and what we like. Less formally, there are tons of roadside stands selling fruit and vegetables as well as grilled corn.

Over the summer, we ate a lot of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant and watermelon. As the seasons have changed, a trip to the market is an explosion of orange and purple with cabbage and carrots as well as potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower. For a shorter time, we had persimmons and pomegranates. There was also another kind of fruit that my mom made jelly out of (read: boiled the fruit in countless kilos of sugar). It was yellow and bumpy and I’m still looking for its translation. Now we have oranges, lemons (which Albanians will eat by biting right into it, although they often put salt on it first) and mandarins.

Sometimes, I’ve never seen the fruit that my family offers me. As a result, I don’t know how to eat it. It makes me think of a passage from Slavenka Drakulic’s book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. After the fall of communism, Western goods flooded the market and people were exposed to all kinds of things that they had never seen before. Drakulic describes how she saw a Polish man eating a banana with the peel on and then saying it was one of the best things he’d ever eaten. Something about this image has stuck with me.

I only have one complain about the food vendors here. Since we’ve been here, we’ve observed that Albanians eat their fruit and vegetables at varying degrees of ripeness. I’ve been told to eat a pear, only to bite into it and be surprised that my teeth haven’t snapped off completely. The same with peaches. I’ve had oranges that tasted like lemons because they were so sour and I’ve also been told that it’s alright to eat a green banana that you could barely peel. To be certain, we have lots of great indigenous food grown here, but the degree of ripeness is the X-factor. I talked to one of my Albanian friends about this, and he told me that everything is controlled by the market. If farmers know that there aren’t many oranges on the market, they will hurry to pick them even when they aren’t ripe because they can sell them at a higher price. It’s your textbook example of supply determining price but it can lead to heartache when all you really want is a ripe plum but instead you end up biting into something that is more like a purple baseball.