$1

[jim king]

One of the good things about living at the end of the world.  This is less than $1 of fruit.

 

ere is less than 1$ worth of fruit.

[Magicman]

What does fresh star fruit taste like?

[Jeff]

Jim, when we were in Costa Rica, that is one thing I noticed, was the food hanging everywhere you looked, and the fruit was amazing. when you pick it off from the tree in the place it was meant to grow, the taste is indescribably.  better then anything we get shipped up to us. I think the only thing we could out do you on are maybe Apples Cherries and Blue berries.

[jim king]

Star fruit is very tart eaten alone but in juice with a bit of sugar it is excellent and the pure juice with rum is also excellent.

We do have a jungle blue berry that is the same as up North but we have nothing like black berries in the Amazon, we have all types of apples from Chile.  In Bogota, Colombia they have huge blackberries that are wonderful as the climate is spring time every day, 40 at night and about 65 every day, never hot and never cold.  Roses there are 50 cents a dozen at every street corner when at a stop light.  

They ship at least a plane load of roses daily to the States, when you fly in you see hundreds of acres of green houses of flowers..

[DanG]

That is pure luxury right there, at any price! 8)  The question I have is, how long does the typical peasant have to work to earn that dollar?  All things are relative, ya know. ;)

[jim king]

The question I have is, how long does the typical peasant have to work to earn that dollar?  All things are relative, ya know.

DanG:
The poorest people in the Amazon are the people who live on the river banks out of town, the subsistance farmers.  They earn about $20 per month per family and live off the land.  The fish, meat, yucca and dozens of types of fruit are free.

The next layer would be the minimum wage workers in the city who earn $8.60 a day plus insurance and two months paid vacation or two months extra pay whichever they choose.

The next would be the thousands of motor taxi drivers who earn in the range of $15 a day and from there it goes on up to the sky is the limit.

[WildDog]

Hi Jim, looks good, I could live on tropical fruit (with a bit of beef Saddly Mangoes in my area havn't got below $2.98 this season, Nicky brought home a rock mellon/cantellope for $6.98 :(. Its out of the norm here this season with heaps of rain.

[Tom]

I'll bet you don't have any apples down there.   

I was visiting Jeff, in Michigan, a few years ago and there were volunteer apple trees all over the sides of the roads.  Unfortunately I was a little bit early to take advantage of them or I would have made myself sick.

It used to be that way in Florida before all the folks from up north came down and chopped down the fruit trees.  We kids ate coconuts, mangoes, guavas, surinam cherries, carrisa plum, sea grape and a myriad of other fruits that were abundant in yards, along ditch banks and up and down every street.  I sure miss those days.

[jim king]

We have an endless supply of fruits and always a new one in the market that I have never seen before.  $2.98 for a mango would put me on a non mango diet and $6.98 for a cantalope would do me in. The lady across the street last week was selling a pail of mangos for about a dollar.

Definitly no apples or plumbs but grapes do grow in the tropics if kept in a raised bed with good drainage.  No regular potatoes can be grown but sweet potatoes are plentiful in orange, white or purple and the local people dont like them but I do.  They cook sweet potatoes for dog food here.

[Tom]

Woof !!

[Don_Papenburg]

But in asia they cook dogs for food.

[SwampDonkey]

Good grief Charlie Brown, they won't eat yam or sweet potato? I thought you were in Peru? Must be the city folks or something. Even a good old regular potato from the mountains down there is where they come from to start with.  : I can live off potatoes, but a diet of just fruit and I'd have the flying axe handles. I'm sure the fruit is good, but I gotta have some substance. :D Need a piece of that fish or jungle meat also. I figure if the locals can eat it I can, they like good things like any other human.

Mangoes up here go for $1.50 -$3.00, I don't buy it. Cantalope isn't any good this time of year, but it can be bought for $2-3. I only like the yellow skinned ones and we can't get them in winter. Bananas are $0.89/lb and pineapple is around $4. In the fall I buy about 4 bushels of apples for sauce. Only certain kind make good sauce, when they are gone I don't buy another apple. I don't buy apples at the store, I can get them for <1/4 the price at the farmer. Stores want $1.50 a pound, the heck with that noise.

[jim king]

But in asia they cook dogs for food.

We have that in Peru also as we have a lot of Oriental imigrants and they also eat cats.  That is one of the reasons we have 60 plus dogs, my wife cant stand hearing about that and she collects the street dogs to save them from being lunch.

We have a lot of super sweet pineapple also from the jungle.  As for the beef it is not easy to eat.  I make a tendorizer out of papaya leaves in the blender and it makes the meat tender in a couple of hours.  Just grass fed skinny brahma types and water buffaloe here.  The pork and chicken is normal.

[barbender]

There is a jungle blue berry?

[jim king]

I dont know if it is really a blue berry but it looks like one and tastes like one.  The bush is a bit scragly and about 3 feet tall.

I have been deer hunting in Deer River a long time ago.

[SwampDonkey]

They may be a species of serviceberry Jim, there are more species of those in the world than you can count. Up here they will grow tall on a skinny stalk with flowers that have long petals, blueberry blossoms are bell like. But both fruit look the same.

[northwoods1]

I think mangoes have to be one of my newest most favorite fruits. I got a couple jars of these hot pickled mangoes that you commonly would eat with traditional indian food and I just love those things. They make about the best chutney or relish too, sweet and spicy. This past fall I bought some from a store in Green Bay, 80 mile drive for me, and they were good quality and cheap. It was a Woodmans grocery store. I don't know where they get the fruits and veggies but they always have a large selection and some of it very reasonably priced. It is far from being fresh though like what you have there Jim
This past summer I had been staying out in Utah for a while. I couldn't believe the apricot trees they had there,and fruit trees in general,  even trees just out in the brush that no one maintained for years were just loaded with the most perfect apricots. I brought a few pails home. They are so good dried.

[jim king]

I didn´t know the world knew of this fruit but Google had some info.  Now studying this it is not the one I thought.  I will look some more, this palm fruit and the root is used here in a tea to cure type II diabetes.

May 14 (Bloomberg) -- Rising U.S. sales of acai, a purple Amazon berry promoted as a "superfood" on Oprah Winfrey's Web site, are depriving Brazilian jungle dwellers of a protein-rich nutrient they've relied on for generations.

U.S. consumers are turning a "a typical poor people's food into something like a delicacy," said Oscar Nogueira, who specializes in the fruit at Embrapa, Brazil's agricultural research company.

Spending on acai-based products by Americans seeking to lose weight, gain energy or slow aging doubled to $104 million last year, according to SPINS, a Schaumburg, Illinois-based market research firm. Since U.S. demand took off early this decade, the fruit's wholesale price in Brazil has jumped about 60-fold, Embrapa data show.