Fruit – the Singapore birthright
Americans are pleased to say that free speech is their national birthright. Well, in Singapore that’s not necessarily the case, but at least everyone has access to cheap fresh fruit. And considering what use a lot of Americans make of their free speech rights (hate speech [including ideological and religious ranting], porn, lobbyists, the Ku Klux Clan), one could make an argument for the Singaporean option’s superiority.
This picture is a fruit and juice stand in the basement of the local mall. For a small price the clerks manning the stall will slice up any variety of these fruits you choose and serve them to you on a plate with ice and skewers – or you can buy the fruit as is and eat it on the go. You can ask them to juice the stuff too, or to poke a hole in a coconut and give you a straw. It’s so easy – someone has done all the washing, peeling and slicing for you. The big technical feature here is the refrigerated case.
Of course you can rough it, and just buy unprocessed fruit from the little kiosks distributed around the bus station. Here’s a man cutting rambutans from the twigs they grew on. It must be after 7 p.m., since the lights are on in the apartment block visible to the right. No fridge here, but lights and a fan suffice. He’ll likely stay open until midnight.
His partner is selling other things on another day: peeled coconuts, wrapped in plastic to keep the dust off; mangoes, sugar cane juice.
And finally below, at another stand, some prepared jackfruit – or is is durian? Jackfruit is yellower, but if the durian’s been around for more than an hour or two it might turn from creamy white to this color. At any rate, this is a fruit that takes major excavation because it comes in a hard rind; durians can fall from heights of 40 feet and remain intact. The stall manager has taken a machete and whacked the fruit open before extracting these yummy little bits for his customers’ delectation. Please note that durians are so smelly that it’s illegal to carry them on the trains and buses. I guess you have to eat them at the marketplace or risk a fine. Although the only time we’ve seen anyone get kicked off the train for carrying something smelly it was a lady bringing home a bag of manure from the zoo, to fertilize her plants.