This was in the Weekend FT (UK) and I thought others might enjoy the recommendation.
Quote: | My mum says fruit is good for me and sweets are bad. Please help me convince
her that she’s wrong.
Andrew, age 11
You’re quite right to be wary. From the Bible onwards, fruit is the
deceptive accessory of all who seek to misguide. Where the serpent led Eve
to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, all evildoers follow.
It wasn’t a square of chocolate or a stick of rock that the Wicked Queen
used to poison Snow White. No, it was a bright, sparkling apple. If Snow
White had eaten her five a day, even the prince wouldn’t have been able to
wake her from slumber.
But it’s not just children’s stories that warn of such evils. In the
Odyssey, lotus fruits drug the warriors on their journey home from Troy -
they crave nothing but to eat more; Odysseus has to lock them back on to the
ship to travel on.
In The Grapes of Wrath, an ad for fruit-picking jobs in California is only
the start of a path to poverty and murder. In Jeanette Winterson’s
semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the young
Jeanette has nightmares about the fruit her repressive mother favours; in
one dream, a demon sits inside the orange she unpeels. The more you search
for fruit, the more rot you find.
But the sweet-eaters of the fictional universe are a far happier crowd. The
girls of the Chalet School and Malory Towers hold numerous midnight feasts,
but nowhere do we hear talk of obesity or early onset diabetes. The Famous
Five’s constant consumption of chocolate cake propels them only to solve the
next mystery. And in Joanne Harris’s Chocolat, sweets are the delight of the
soul, the food of dreams. What humble pear or banana could ever make that
claim? Eat on, I say.
bookdoctor@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007 |
|