$4.25 for a what?
Living in the United States, breadbasket (and corn bushel) of the world that it is, it’s really easy to get used to the idea that food is cheap. Just looking at my weekly Safeway circular, I see whole chickens for $1.69/pound (buy one get another free), pork ribs for $1.79/pound, apples for 99¢/pound, and oranges practically there for the taking ($2.99 for an 8 pound bag). Part of this, I’m sure, is that I live in California, specifically, land of fruits and nuts that it is, but the basic premise remains.
Compare this to Japan, where an apple costs at least ¥398 (about $4.25 at time of this writing). That’s one apple. You can see it off to the right. It’s a beautiful apple, uniformly frosted red all around, and it’s pretty big, big enough to make me spread my fingers a bit when I hold it, but it’s just one apple all the same.
Truly, I live in a land of plenty.
On the other hand, I wonder sometimes if we pay something for that abundance. It’s easy to think of food as a commodity, to think that one apple is the same as another, but that really isn’t the case. Food is a biological product, the end-result of some living thing and the environment around it, its lineage, handling, and care. For example, the Red Delicious is very red, but it’s only nominally delicious, because it’s been bred to be harvested early, in enormous quantities, and trucked across the continent. On the other end of the spectrum, Japanese farmers have made a science out of growing delicious, picture-perfect apples. That apple was simply better, crisper, sweeter, and better-balanced than anything I’ve ever bought at Safeway (or Whole Paycheck, for that matter, or even farmer’s markets and freeway-side stands), and I would love the chance to indulge in more, if only once in a while. At $4.25 each, Japanese apples could get almost as expensive as a bad Starbuck’s habit.
In Japan, though, that was more-or-less a standard apple, and by Japanese standards, it was quite reasonably priced. I found apples just like mine in every grocery store I visited, at train station fruit vendors, and sometimes in department stores and even 7-11s. Japanese consumers expect apples of that quality, and they’re willing to pay for them, so there are no cheap apples, only precious, semi-rare treats. Here in the United States, I’m guessing, we don’t and aren’t, so apples are cheap and plentiful, everyday in every meaning of the word.
I wonder, what does this say about them? What does it say about us?
That is very, very fascinating.
(So is the fact that there’s an entire article dedicated to them.)
It’s interesting how in Japan, a land where I’ve heard everybody’s in a rush, they still have the time to essentially make a perfect fruit. We Americans ib the other hand are also in a rush, but don’t do the same.