Peaches are like people. They are born by their aging tree mothers arranged in clusters of commingling shapes and sizes. They grow and swell to maturity against the odds of climate change, disease, and an onslaught of ravenous wildlife and insects. The result of all these environmental pressures is an immense and amazing spectrum of difference. Us farmers spend our days combing over every little variability in every peach, often impressed and amused by the diversity.
There’s the winking peach, who’s skin tightens up into a goofy gnarled toothless grin and looks like it might just spit into a spittoon. There’s the mini peach, often found in the leaf curl-ridden canopy of the trees or down in the shade in a cohort of mini peaches that bartered for limited nutrients in these restrictive growing conditions. There’s the split pit peach, who generously provides a home for a family of pincher bugs. There’s the pecked peach, who nourishes the red-breasted robin mothers of speckled blue eggs. There’s the outie peach, who, well, has an outie (see below). There’s the voluptuous peach, who somehow soaked up the sun before the rest and is already bursting with juices when the farmer arrives.
Perusing the piles of fruit in the grocery store, the average customer wouldn’t know such diversity exists. Not unlike the lingerie stores that plaster airbrushed images of the bodies of models in a storefront window, grocery stores will only allow their shelves to advertise a particular shape, a particular color, a particular texture and a particular size of peach. The rest of these fruits find their way to feed the earthworms, the trees themselves, the squirrels, a snacking farmer, or maybe even an open-minded customer.
