Vegetables and fruits are beautiful. Partly it's their bright colors--the bright scarlet of tomatoes, the brilliant yellow of lemons, the shiny green of peppers; partly it's their varied shapes--round, conical, cylindrical, elliptical; and partly it's the patterns they make when one shape is repeated, as in a basket of oranges, or various shapes and colors are juxtaposed. It's easy to understand how the Italian artist Della Robbia was inspired to use these eatables for his decorative wreaths.
When I moved into the first house I owned, long ago, I went shopping for curtain material for the large sliding glass door in my kitchen. I fell in love with one that had a pattern of brightly colored vegetables on a white background--tomatoes, carrots, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, and basil. The fabric was too expensive for me to afford, but my mother, seeing how much I wanted it, generously bought it for me.
Since then, as I've moved from one house to another, I've cut and altered the material to fit the windows in whatever kitchen I had. When it got too worn in places for curtains, I made it into napkins and used them till they wore out. Now, 35 years later, I am still using the last remnant of that fabric for a ruffled valance over my kitchen window, and I still love the design.
I was reminded of this lifelong love for vegetables when John and I went to rent a video at Video Vive and found Fruteria Victor next door. We made our way through the lot beside the store, among boxes and baskets of oranges, potatoes, bananas, grapefruit, onions, beans, hominy, and nuts, to speak to Victor Corrales, the owner, who was standing outside keeping an eye on the store and watching his small puppy eating its dinner.
We remembered having seen this store when it first opened 2 or 3 years ago; we were staying at the Hotel Villa Granada around the corner. Then it had only a small selection, so it was good to see how it has grown and prospered. John asked Victor how long it took to sell all the produce in stock, and he said 3 or 4 days. Every Tuesday and Friday he gets in a new shipment, and most of it is gone before the next one comes in.
We went inside where the shop is attended by Victor's wife Cristina and her 18-year-old brother Heidy. Victor and Cristina's daughter Siddney was helping too, a beautiful little girl 5 years old. She has a 3-year-old brother at home, but I failed to get his name.
While John was renting the video next door, I wandered around the shop, enjoying the sights and textures of all the produce. I was amused to see several bags of Ocean Spray cranberries because just the week before I had talked to a Mexican friend who had never heard of them; I decided they must be unknown in Mexico. But here they were, no doubt stocked for the convenience of Americans who want the traditional cranberry sauce with their roast turkey.
In addition to all the vegetables and fruits I know in the U.S., I noticed a bin of tiny potatoes, about 1 1/2 inches in diameter, bunches of small bananas only 3 or 4 inches long, and a tray of large banana leaves. Cristina told me that they are not eaten but used to wrap food for steaming. Perhaps the most obvious difference from the stores I am used to was the huge variety of peppers--long dark green ones, short round ones, plump yellow ones, tiny jalapeños, pea-sized chili tepines, red, yellow, and green bell peppers, straight and slender chilis, large and crinkled chilis, all sitting in their bins, each waiting to give its unique flavor to a dish of meat or beans or a spicy salsa.
I'll be going back often to shop at Fruteria Victor because of its wide range of selection, the aesthetic delight of the beautiful produce, and the sense of well-being that comes from viewing the abundance of the earth.
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