Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 21 April 1903
We are becoming so spoiled with the new fruits, which within the last year or two have been submitted for our approval in a succession of enterprises, that at the beginning of a new season one expects almost as a right some new products from the ends of the earth.
However, I have found from an interview with Mr. Garcia of Covent Garden that, though we have not done with the ends of the earth, we are not likely this year to have any more new fruits. Buenos Ayres is contributing apples, pears, plums, and peaches, and the remarkable thing is that as yet they have done the journey as ordinary freight and not in refrigerators. Of course, if the market is a success the supplies will come, as a rule, in chilled chambers.
It will be seen that the new land is not going to send us anything new; the public, it appears, does not like new fruits. It is not for want of wooing; grape fruit, mangoes, pummeloes, and stranger things still, such as the little things like tiny pears which some people call japonica and South Africa calls cumquats, have none of them been a commercial success.
Some mangoes were sent over last year with every care in packing, and many stood the journey well; they were only sold to the few who know what mangoes are. The enterprising dealer did not lose anything, but, on the other hand, he created no new taste. Mr. Garcia made rather a new point in admitting that there is little temptation in tropical fruit for people in this country. It is not only that you cannot get tropical fruits here in the pink of condition; it is also that their attractions really belong to their own climate.
I suggested that the prices at which some of these experiments are offered were against the creation of a popular taste, and that as soon as bananas or, before them, tomatoes became plentiful and cheap the popular taste was ready enough for them; but, then, the supplies of such things as custard-apples cannot, as far as the dealers can see at present, be on anything like the same scale as the supply of bananas, and therefore must remain dear and make the best of being a kind of fashion just because they are dear.
The increase in the public appetite for fruit seems to have been extraordinary. No one outside the fruit business, I was told, can have any idea of it. Only five or ten years ago January, February, March, April and May were months of almost no fruit; to-day the low prices of all transport by sea has worked a revolution. Oranges are sold as cheap in London as in any town in Spain.