Pineapples: The best fruit under the sun

By Rose Prince Published: 7:03AM GMT twenty-four Feb 2010

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Exotic pleasure: pineapple extract creates an glorious brine for shellfish Photo: ALAMY

Saturday is ripened offspring day. If we"ve had a pretty early night on Friday, I am up and out to find ripened offspring for the following week. I wish it in paper bags, not cosmetic from the supermarket. And I wish to be selling at my internal greengrocer or farmers" market.

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In early March, there is zero in the farmers" marketplace solely a couple of apples and pears that growers have managed to store by the winter. At the internal greengrocer in Battersea High Street (the last superfluous one after the alternative 3 in the area sealed down), Bill and Terry Raynsford sell the freshest British vegetables, paid for early that sunrise in the London indiscriminate markets. Yet detached from the occasional unequivocally acquire box of pinkish forced Yorkshire rhubarb, there is small newly harvested British fruit.

In the inlet of winter when the preference of home-grown ripened offspring is so limited, I don"t kick myself up about food miles. The immature kids hatred rhubarb, and Bill and Terry sell good-quality mangoes and pineapples, that are a source of outrageous pleasure. Aside from a sign that the food universe is not flat, a glance of exotica is a sign that the object might not be resplendent where we live but it does somewhere else mostly a place where a ripened offspring traffic with Europe is an necessary business.

This year, for the initial time given prior to the immature kids were born, we had a ambience of what that unequivocally means, in the place where it is means to grow. The guilty wish of a midwinter week in the Bahamas is one I frequency brave share. But over a breakfast of outlandish ripened offspring on the initial day on Harbour Island, with the Atlantic subsequent to us crashing onto a beach where the silt was similar to pinkish sherbet, I split a square of pineapple in to my mouth and asked if it was local. It wasn"t.

To be fair, it is a small early in the deteriorate for this fruit, but after that day the cook at the Coral Sands Hotel, Ludo Jarland, explained that the Bahamas produces a shockingly small volume of the own food. "Aside from the fish, that is excellent, I find it unequivocally tough to buy anything," he says. "Most of the food comes on a vessel from Miami."

Jarland is French but his kitchen is staffed by internal people. He uses the mahi mahi, lobster, crab and grouper that internal fishermen sell him in meals that mix European influences with Caribbean. His lobster bouillabaisse with jalapeño aioli was one of the most appropriate bowls of food I have eaten in a prolonged time and his crab fritters are a disobedient pleasure.

Jarland admitted, however, that all was not lost. "Recently I have been means to buy ripened offspring from Eleuthera, the subsequent island," he says. I examine serve and the traveller house discuss it me that the island is some-more than 100 miles long, nonetheless no some-more than 3 miles wide. They additionally discuss it me about a rancher who is reviving agriculture.

Enter Diana Thompson, a incomparable than hold up she-farmer bumping down a lane in a pickup towards her plantation nearby Gregory Town on Eleuthera. Her plantation has perceived a accede to from the Bahamas Agriculture and Industrial Corporation (BAIC), set up by the Bahamian supervision who are endangered that their tillage industry has been lost.

"Eleuthera pineapples were regularly important for their white honeyed strength and I have 3 acres flourishing here," she exclaims delightedly, display me a tract of dim immature cactus-like plants. At the centre of each, little immature pineapples are sprouting. "The BAIC assistance me with income to buy fertilizer and cosmetic sheeting to keep out weeds," she says. "I have pineapples flourishing here value $40,000 and that should inspire alternative Eleuthera people to get behind to farming."

The high cost of oil has been a wake-up call for the Bahamas. I after sense that high burden costs to the islands are ensuing in a genuine mushrooming of new farms and the goal is that island chefs similar to Jarland and internal Bahamian people, too, will have entrance to fruit, salad and vegetables, together with high-energy roots similar to honeyed potato. "Bahamians need to get serious," insists Thompson. "We are importing $9 million value of bananas at the impulse that we could grow here."

Britain has the own food security problems; we rely on imports to encounter open needs. We as well are not utilizing the land scrupulously to furnish some-more food that we can eat and new cost rises prove an obligatory need to shift this, something the British Government has at last addressed with Hilary Benn"s Food 2030 strategy.

One thing we will not be means to do, though, is grow the own pineapples, mangoes, papayas or bananas. Next month, when British land might only as well be a dried for all it can yield, I will be down at Bill and Terry"s emporium in Battersea, shopping ripened offspring that reminds me of the sun.

SHOPPING BASKET

Okè Fairtrade Pineapples: pineapples from writer groups that embrace a satisfactory salary are accessible from Asda, Tesco, Marks & Spencer and the Co-operative. Look out for the Fairtrade trademark on the label. Coral Sands Hotel, Harbour Island, Bahamas (001 242 333 2350; coralsands.com)

We stayed for a couple of days at this poetic country-house-style road house afterwards changed down the beach to the sister hotel, the Pink Sands (001 242 333 2030; pinksandsresort.com) where we ate similarly great but opposite food, together with glorious sushi and sashimi done from internal fish in cook James Van Dyke"s shining kitchen. You can additionally take in progress classes there. We organised the outing with Bahamas Flavour (bahamasflavour.co.uk)