The beautiful Canadian banana and the sad picanha from London – 10/06/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

TikTok, which never disappoints, gave us a video of a Brazilian influencer reciting praises for a banana sold in Canada.

“Look how beautiful Canadian bananas are”, says Lord Vinhateiro, in a video made in the city of Vancouver. “Oh, smooth ones!”

He seems enchanted by the appearance of the fruit’s skin. In his words, no scabbers, rashes or stretch marks.

Despite the ironic tone of the speech, it gives the impression that the subject really thinks that bananas from Canada are superior to bananas from the Ribeira Valley. Because the Brazilian fruit is not so beautiful, it has black spots on the skin.

A tremendous blunder.

The penultimate time I came to London, a mistake when booking accommodation resulted in me being rewarded with a five-star hotel in Mayfair, which was chic at last. When we got there, there was a fruit basket with a welcome note.

They were the most beautiful fruits I had ever seen. Apple like Snow White’s. Perfect banana like the ones in Vancouver. I bit one, bit another. None of them tasted like anything. They both went in the trash.

Waitrose, the supermarket closest to where I live, only sells beautiful vegetables. Everything is shiny, verdant, lush, smooth, looking like something scenographic, made of wax. Wax peppers, styrofoam melons, plastic plums.

Consumers in rich countries do not accept foods that look ugly or poor. This, as you can deduce, results in colossal waste.

As for tropical fruits, there’s another thing: they always come from far away and need to endure the journey.

The tiktoker’s banana has a label from Dole, a fruit megacorporation that started with Hawaiian pineapples: they sell bananas from Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, none from Canada.

To control stock throughout the year, fruit distributors use tricks of physics (temperature and light) and chemistry (gases that induce ripening at the desired time). That’s why there’s all kinds of fruit all the time.

It’s not smart to want to eat bananas in England or Canada. Here, blueberries and raspberries are what’s on offer.

When you travel to a distant country, insisting on keeping food from home is stupid stubbornness. You pay more and get poor food.

But people insist on dreams of waltzes, paçoca (here they are, but it was smuggled, I’ll tell you later), Monday stuffed biscuits and Thursday chocolate milk. Everything is a bit old and overpriced.

I thought about this when I came across a steak labeled sirloin at Marks and Spencer, another English retailer. Small, thin, sad steak, English meat, without a layer of fat. I didn’t even see the price – it’s never low – because I didn’t even consider buying it.

I’m not in Brazil. I’ll be back soon, but for now I’m trying to eat the best way I can here, which doesn’t include picanha or bananas.

Returning quickly to Canadian bananas, it is wrong to say that they do not exist. I did some research and saw that there are some crazy people with an indoor farm in Ontario, where they also produce papaya, passion fruit and guava.

It must be everything, oh

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