Last winter's fruit stalls were dominated by dazzling yellows, making up for the absence of Taipei's sunshine. Winter ills were kept at bay by our tireless consumption of sweet, juicy tangerines and mandarin oranges. Apples, red and green; grapes, translucent green and deep purple, added dashes of color and tang. And, if it's possible that one can tire of such a diet, it was not too long before spring brought the delicate golden loquat and bright red mountains of strawberries.
Indeed, the possibilities for fresh fruit salads from the daily fruit fare on sale here are endless enough to send vegetarians happily drawing up fresh menus for life.
But no one is more impressed by this booming development of Taiwan's fruit: industry than local consumers themselves. Not that fruit was ever difficult to obtain. Both sun-kissed and rain-saturated, with nippy winters and steamy summers, its landscapes sweeping from coastal plains to soaring peaks, the island's variation provides suitable environments for almost any kind of fruit.
Most island families, before the dynamic pace of industrialization picked up in the 60's, were housed in family compounds with their own gardens. Our friends still recall with nostalgia, the grape vines that meandered over veranda roofs, providing both shade and produce, and gardens standardly equipped with one or two each of guava, banana, papaya, and mango trees. Each day would bring the familiar call of a fruit seller down the laneways, and most housekeepers would respond with a modest purchase to fill out student and workers' lunch boxes and to serve as dessert for the evening meal.
No, it is not that fruit was ever in short supply. The surprise lies in the fact that despite the headlong industrialization, urban expansion, rural area shrinkage, and explosive population growth, fruit is in such unprecedented plentiful and varied supply. And supply is just one side of the story. Most people feel that a miracle has been worked in terms of both fruit quality and year round availability. The responsible agent, of course, is not magic, but science.
Taiwan's orchards have always been very small scale family concerns, and farming style more "garden art" than anything resembling "agribusiness." The task of translating such art into an industry was undertaken by the Department of Agriculture and the Taiwan Farmers' Association, the latter long a formative force of Taiwan's rural reconstruction and development. It plays a vital role for today's fruitgrowers in providing loans, machinery leases, fruit collection, and marketing support.
Department of Agriculture backup services include the facilities of the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute, which gives high priority to servicing the fruit industry. With links to internationally prominent agricultural science centers, its laboratories are able to adapt the latest techniques in grafting and genetic engineering of trees, fruiting manipulation, fertilizing, and disease control to the local context. Special emphasis is given to citrus experimentation at the Chiayi laboratory, to mangos at Kaohsiung. Transferring successful experimentation into practice is the role of the technical advisers of the District Agricultural Improvement Stations. Through islandwide extension agencies, they are able to work side by side with the growers, a cooperative effect which has resulted in dramatic strides in almost every fruit growing venture.
Citrus orchardists, for instance, have seen new life come to an aging industry. With the 34,000 hectares of citrus orchards now under cultivation giving an average annual yield of 360,000 metric tons, mandarin oranges and tangerines are the biggest portion of Taiwan's fruit production. The fact that storage warehouses have long been ruled out as a feasible possibility for fruit production and marketing in Taiwan, is a feature that most would agree contributes to the superior freshness and quality of the island's fruit produce. Still, to overcome the problem this poses for long term supply, many systems are being operated.
In citrus growing, for example, researchers have mapped out orchard locations stretching from the warm, sunny, sloping hills around Chiayi County in Taiwan's central-western plain, to the colder regions of the island's far north. The climate variation ensures householders adequate supplies of citrus from mid-autumn right through to late spring.
And the demand is great. According to the precepts of Chinese nutrition, the dark-fleshed mandarin orange is a "heat" producing food, while its counterpart, the lemon-tinted tangerine has a "cooling" effect. Throughout the winter, every household will consume startlingly large amounts every day of both, thus helping to maintain the harmony in the body so essential to good health.
Domestic demand for citrus is so great that there has been no need to seek export outlets. Nevertheless, none could be pickier about fruit quality than home consumers, and industry researchers and farmers work together tirelessly to improve the product. Greenhouses have been set up for nursery propagation of hardier tree varieties, Florida orchards being the main suppliers. At present, though Taiwan's citrus trees enjoy only a short life, only one-third that of their American cousins, that life is certainly one full of sweetness and vitality.
Second in importance to citrus is the banana crop. A friend once told me of a Pacific island where he had counted 25 varieties of banana. Being so richly endowed with other fruit varieties, Taiwan hardly has to invest so much effort to multiply its few basic banana strains. And Taiwan bananas have enjoyed an honorable reputation in the Asian export market, particularly in Japan, for many years, and producers mean to do their best to maintain that status, though recent competition from the Philippines has become very intense.
But the island's blessings have their down side. The Republic of China's rapidly growing affluence these past few years has, for instance, proved a double bind for the fruit export market. Faced with increased labor costs, several formerly very successful fruit exports, such as canned pineapples, have declined against the competition from less developed countries in the region. Fruit growers have, accordingly, turned more and more to supplying a seemingly insatiable domestic market, which needs no convincing that the best fruit at the right rice grows right at the doorstep. Nevertheless, the search for export openings is not over. Hopes are high that new stars in the island's export fruit pantheon—such as mangos, wax apples, and lichees—may begin to please foreign palates as much as they do those at home.
Researchers probing the techniques of year round fruiting have had particular success here with the wax apple. Methods to break dormancy, and root saturation and strangulation to aid greater fruit production are some of the tortures agricultural scientists inflict. Surprisingly, the results are quite the opposite of what one might expect from a crop so traumatized.
Wax apples are a special, personal favorite—pink skinned, white fleshed, crisp, very juicy, and not overly sweet. Obviously, orchardists like them too, as acreage given over to wax apples has increased enormously. The particular advantage of the fruit for the farmer is that picking is greatly facilitated by the fact that wax apples grow in clusters, close to branches.
Vineyards too are expanding greatly since the application of scientific techniques has allowed growers to have some vines in a dormant state and others ready or harvest, side by side, thus providing an extended season. The quality has improved markedly with the introduction of choice varieties from Italy and Germany, and this, in turn, has had an excellent influence on locally produced table wines.
By definition, watermelons shouldn't qualify for mention as a fruit article, but a report on Taiwan's fruit scene would be bereft without them, as indeed would be the hot summers without their cooling presence. Everyone in Taiwan tells visitors with justified pride of the deliciousness of the island's watermelons, and of the red, seedless variety that is a special local innovation.
Actually, on an associated subject, some confusion reigns in many laymen's minds as to how watermelon seeds are extracted. On one occasion while munching endless handfuls of kuatzu (watermelon seeds), a favorite snack with every one, a friend seriously offered the information that this is where all consumed watermelon seeds end up, that it is all just another example of Chinese applying their legendary practical-mindedness.
In any case, the history of watermelon growing on Taiwan predates genetic tampering by many decades, and as one travels the island, they can be seen growing comfortably in many locations. The winter melons hail from balmy Kenting, and those of springtime are harvested further north. Most interesting of locations, however, are along the coastal river mouths, where rocky beds are cleared by hand into immaculately even contours, and a dribble irrigation system from the nearby stream is utilized. These watermelons must reach maturity in early summer—before the first typhoons arrive—or be lost to the floodtides.
About as far away as is possible from these hot, dry river beds grow the delicate peaches, pears, and apples of mountainous Lishan. What began as an experiment 25 years ago to help retired servicemen, has grown into a successful industry providing Taiwan with homegrown varieties that arrive fresh in the markets from the orchards.
The crisp coolness and exhilarating beauty of the area they grow in seem directly infused into the crisp texture and sweet tangy flavor of Lishan's peaches, pears, and apples. Despite their superior favor, however, Lishan apples have suffered drastically from the influx in recent years of larger apples imported from the USA, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia. Producing a crop on the slopes of Lishan is also a protracted and hard laboring experience and cannot easily compete with the sleek, "agribusiness" imports. Still, for local consumers, the magic of being able to afford a basket of apples on the dinner table is mesmerizing, when only 10 years ago a single red apple would have cost almost half of a worker's daily wage. Lishan producers have taken a solid stand based on the genuine advantages of their domestically grown product and hope for farming advances that will enable them to see their market share expand again.
Taiwan farmers should certainly feel gratified that the fruits of their labors are so appreciated by their fellow citizens. An enormous amount of time spent in conversation with and among the Chinese centers on food, and in Taiwan, talk of fruit takes up a large percentage of the overall topic.
"One of the things I like most about living here is eating all this exotic fruit," I remarked to a friend, as on a hot summer's night we became progressively stickier while devouring a huge bunch of lichees. My friend pointed out that such things as lichees, loquats, and star fruit were hardly exotic to the Chinese, as they had domesticated them some eons ago. "Now strawberries are what I dream of," she said. When she was a young girl, strawberries were something to read of in foreign story books. Now, each year during March and April, thousands of Taiwan city-bound families make weekend forays into the countryside to pick their own from farms operating under a new "U-Pick" harvest method.
Chinese cuisine teaches a myriad ways of artistically presenting a plate of fruit for dessert. And a Chinese dessert made up of fresh fruit is sliced and decorated so beautifully as to seem very much a special gourmet offering.
For my part, I enjoy adapting Western fancy dessert methods to the local fruit range with stunning results—fresh lichees, seeded and stuffed with preserved ginger and then dipped into chocolate, is one luscious concoction.
Nevertheless, there are limits to where East and West meet in combing ideas for fruit.
One night, my friend and I stopped into an icecream parlor for a snack and were served with cream caramel decorated with tomatoes. "Now that is really exotic," my friend and I agreed.