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Apr. 23rd, 2007 05:54 pmIt’s mango season again.
If that doesn’t sound ominous - you’ve never had a fruit tree in your yard. My trees are just nearing ripeness, and I’m having visions of these mangos rotting on the ground, like the grapefruit did a few months ago. (True story: rotting grapefruit is kind of terrifying. It smells worse than burning hair.) Also, mangos are stringy, and necessitate flossing after each messy devouring. I very strongly associate mangos with the taste of blood, which probably just goes to show that more flossing will do me nothing but good.
Thankfully, this early in the season, everyone’s still excited about mangos, and I’ve been giving neighborhood kids a boost up the tree in exchange for a cut. They don’t eat green mangos with salt here, so I even feel like I’ve successfully passed along some cross-cultural whosis.
Mangos: pretty much made of awesome.
The downside to mango season is it means that cane season is ending. I live along one edge of the two huge plantations that make up the “bread basket of Jamaica.” Most of the bananas and sugar that come off this island are grown on the fields just below my town. Since mid-January they’ve been harvesting the cane in this interesting combination of modern technology and machete. They have these huge trailers that are honestly twenty-five feet tall (I measured) and they fill them overfull with cane. They use front end loaders and they have fleets of tractors, but all the cane is cut by guys who bring their own machete to the job.
They process it right here too. The factory in the middle of the field refines the cane to a sugar that’s more crystallized than brown sugar, but significantly darker than your packaged for Americans Sugar-in-the-Raw. It’s the standard sugar in Jamaica- they sell it by the pound in clear plastic bags at every corner shop on the island. Refining sugar from cane is kind of a disgusting process, full of chemicals and bleach and the less you know, probably the happier you are. The factory belches huge clouds of smoke, and at night, the fires are the only light pollution on this side of the island.
So even though it interferes in my stargazing, and makes me think much more than I’d like about how gross processed food is, I’m sad the cane season’s ending. Because before they send in the guys with machetes, they burn the field. This is probably to clear the undergrowth and remove leaves from the stock, but I love the cane field burning days, because you can smell the caramel for miles. The air tastes sweet.
And I’m going to miss that a little.
If that doesn’t sound ominous - you’ve never had a fruit tree in your yard. My trees are just nearing ripeness, and I’m having visions of these mangos rotting on the ground, like the grapefruit did a few months ago. (True story: rotting grapefruit is kind of terrifying. It smells worse than burning hair.) Also, mangos are stringy, and necessitate flossing after each messy devouring. I very strongly associate mangos with the taste of blood, which probably just goes to show that more flossing will do me nothing but good.
Thankfully, this early in the season, everyone’s still excited about mangos, and I’ve been giving neighborhood kids a boost up the tree in exchange for a cut. They don’t eat green mangos with salt here, so I even feel like I’ve successfully passed along some cross-cultural whosis.
Mangos: pretty much made of awesome.
The downside to mango season is it means that cane season is ending. I live along one edge of the two huge plantations that make up the “bread basket of Jamaica.” Most of the bananas and sugar that come off this island are grown on the fields just below my town. Since mid-January they’ve been harvesting the cane in this interesting combination of modern technology and machete. They have these huge trailers that are honestly twenty-five feet tall (I measured) and they fill them overfull with cane. They use front end loaders and they have fleets of tractors, but all the cane is cut by guys who bring their own machete to the job.
They process it right here too. The factory in the middle of the field refines the cane to a sugar that’s more crystallized than brown sugar, but significantly darker than your packaged for Americans Sugar-in-the-Raw. It’s the standard sugar in Jamaica- they sell it by the pound in clear plastic bags at every corner shop on the island. Refining sugar from cane is kind of a disgusting process, full of chemicals and bleach and the less you know, probably the happier you are. The factory belches huge clouds of smoke, and at night, the fires are the only light pollution on this side of the island.
So even though it interferes in my stargazing, and makes me think much more than I’d like about how gross processed food is, I’m sad the cane season’s ending. Because before they send in the guys with machetes, they burn the field. This is probably to clear the undergrowth and remove leaves from the stock, but I love the cane field burning days, because you can smell the caramel for miles. The air tastes sweet.
And I’m going to miss that a little.
