On 03/07/2016 12:07 AM, MICHAEL LOO -> STEVE THRASHER wrote:

 ML> My friend Ella Lou, the violist whose condition was
 ML> substantially dire and who had to go on Medicaid
....
 ML> and stuff like that, at least 7 kinds, so they don't
 ML> have to eat the same thing two days in a row.

Ah, that's different.  I do buy lots of different kinds, same price so what the
heck.  I bring them home, stack them into piles of the same sort.  Then start
left to right stacking until I get a pile that's not to stable, repeat.  The
last trip I bought enough to hold her through until we leave.  Once again
reinforcing her opinion that I'm the worlds best hunter (I never fail).


MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05

      Title: Ripe Fruits - Part 6
 Categories: Fruits, Ffbb, Info
      Yield: 1 Info


       But some rays of hope do flicker through the darkening clouds of
  American fructiculture.  Take Ron Mansfield.  He is a grower in El
  Dorado County, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada,
  halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, where he farms several
  small parcels, leaving his peaches and nectarines on the trees until
  three or four days before they would drop of their own accord; his
  tree-ripened peaches have at least twice the sugar of those picked
  just at physical maturity and ripened off the tree.  Mansfield picks
  and packs them by hand in single-layer wooden boxes, and two days
  later they are offered at fancy produce stores and restaurants on
  both coasts (and at his own retail farm stand).  Mansfield knows only
  three or four other California growers who try to ship fruit of equal
  quality.
       Margaret and Bill Skaife of Oceanside, California, near San
  Diego, have designed hand-harvesting and packing procedures and
  clever containers (patent pending) for shipping nearly ripe tomatoes,
  strawberries, and stone fruit to distant markets.  (The fruits are
  suspended by their stems and cushioned from swinging against their
  neighbors.)  Their first tomato crop, offered to consumers with a
  gold sticker and money-back guarantee, was a great success at stores
  like Balducci's in New York, which sold two thousand pounds of them
  during peak weeks.  But the Skaifes are still dependent on the
  farming practices and cultivars of growers in California and Mexico
  with whom they contract.
       The methods (and prices) of the LTD company represent a workable
  compromise for the mass market.  Growers who sell to LTD harvest their
  fruit an average of three days later than other growers; the Stop &
  Shop supermarket chain in New England, which has developed on of the
  most active programs in the country to improve the quality of fruit,
  is one of their big customers.  But nothing, I am told, beats a Ron
  Mansfield peach.
       Elsewhere, the future looks grim.  Most American stone fruit is
  grown in California - 96 percent of all apricots, 90 percent of
  nectarines and plums, and 60 percent of freestone peaches and
  Bartlett pears.  The fruit is harvested nearly rock hard, ten or
  fifteen days before it is ripe, to allow for rough picking,
  mechanical handling, and prolonged transportation.  All but the
  firmest fruit would be destroyed by this ordeal.  Under the
  California Tree Fruit Agreement - a joint federal-state industry
  "marketing order" in effect in one form or other since 1933 - growers
  could not ship their fruit unless it met a minimum standard known as
  California Well-Matured.  This simply guaranteed that most tree fruit
  would be fully developed and consequently that it would improve at
  least in color and texture after harvest.  Now the California
  stone-fruit growers want to harvest their produce even earlier.
       Last year the plum growers pulled out of the agreement.  Early
  this year a dissident group of peach and nectarine growers persuaded
  the USDA to add an alternate, lower standard know as U.S. No. 1 or
  U.S. Mature. This will allow them to harvest ever earlier and greener
  provided they say so on their shipping cartons.  One rational is that
  Georgia peaches have long been held to the equivalent of the trifling
  U.S. No. 1 standard and can compete unfairly.  And Colorado growers
  recently abandoned their federal-state inspection program entirely.
  To fruit fanciers, the old criteria were undemanding enough.  The new
  system promises even less.
       In a twist of fate, the predominantly Republican California
  growers were temporarily foiled by President Bush's election-year
  moratorium on new federal regulations.  For the new two-tier fruit
  inspection to circumvent the moratorium and go into effect, the vice
  president's Council on Competitiveness must certify that the
  regulations are 'pro-growth," a term apparently not intended in its
  horticultural sense.  At this writing, the only person who can same
  America from a catastrophic plunge in the quality of its peaches and
  nectarines is Vice President Dan Quale.  Any bets?
                                                July 1992
  : The Man Who Ate Everything
  : Jeffrey Steingarten
  : 1997   ISBN: 0-375-70202-4

MMMMM

Strange things are happening in the world of fidonet.  I got 98 messages this
morning, dated from February.  Forty something later, I forgot what the dates
were, and 58 this time, giving me a grand total of 161 for the last week. 
There were some here already.  I should add that the check for mail is done by
Thunderbird at a set interval.

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