By Chris Mittelstaedt

The 1878 edition of A Domestic Cyclopædia of Practical Information, published by Henry Holt & Company, explained to eager readers the uses for the banana: “It is eaten raw, either alone or cut in slices with sugar and cream, or wine and orange juice. It is also roasted, fried or boiled, and is made into fritters, preserves and marmalades… They are found in our markets from March to October.”

Of the banana it was said: “No other product of the vegetable kingdom affords so much nutriment from a given space of ground as the banana…” Today in the U.S., bananas are imported from Central or South America year-round. Guatemala and Ecuador grow bananas in opposite seasons, and while you can cultivate bananas in certain parts of the U.S. (the humid and tropical South and even some specific microclimates in California), there are no “locally grown” bananas of significant volume.

Bananas are brought to us on ships while still green and are exposed to ethylene gas (a harmless plant hormone, both naturally occurring and synthetically produced, used in the ripening process for many vegetables and fruits). Bananas are transported and stored in their green state at around 57°F before being exposed to ethylene in controlled ripening rooms. Bananas are very delicate, and their ripeness can change quickly due to temperature and humidity. We at The FruitGuys want you to know that if we ever deliver a banana that has ripened too quickly or that you’re not satisfied with, please contact us so we can replace it or credit you for it. At this time of year in colder areas of the country, we may exclude bananas from mixes when extreme cold hits (they can turn black very quickly when exposed to cold even for a short while). We always strive to work with local growers when season and availability permit, and bananas are an exception to this rule, so if you prefer no bananas in your mix, please let us know.

If you have a chance, check out my new blog on inc.com with articles on business innovation and inspiration. And as always, visit fruitguys.com/mix to check out what’s in your case this week and where it came from.

Enjoy and Be Fruitful!

By Chris Mittelstaedt

The college application process was not an easy one for me. I didn’t know where I wanted to go to school, and I had no idea what to say to encapsulate myself in an essay. I finally settled on telling the story of the summer I spent rehabbing houses in the Appalachian Mountain towns of Kentucky. I tried to capture the work we did—rebuilding bathrooms and installing septic systems, framing houses, roofing in 100-degree heat—but my essay seemed jumbled somehow. It was hardest to describe Stafford Walker, a 6-foot-and-some-inches Texan who led our group: quiet and diligent; 1950s square black-framed glasses and a crew cut; constant, steady, and humble. Every time he picked up a hammer, navigated his lanky 60-year-old body onto a steep, two-story roof, or sat and respectfully shared a beer with the owners of the homes we were working on, he showed us all something that was true: be kind and respectful and try to make the world a better place.

I often think about Stafford and others who have been “good works” role models for me. At this time of year, I wanted to let you know a little more about who we are and the charitable programs that are important to us.

The FruitGuys has always been a mission-driven business that attempts not only to have a positive impact on people’s health, but to offer support on two specific fronts: First, to help small farmers become more sustainable; and second, to help people in need with donations of healthy food. As our business grows, we think about ways to expand these programs and how to involve our clients who wish to help. If you’re interested, here’s how you can get involved:

Visit the GoodWorks area of our website at fruitguys.com/goodworks to read about our projects and ways to participate. Our current Almanac newsletter includes expanded information on our GoodWorks program—sign up for this monthly e-newsletter on our homepage at fruitguys.com or via our Almanac. As projects come up during the year, we’ll let you know how you can help.

Next, I encourage you to consider our Donate-a-Crate program if your office will be closed on any of the fruit delivery days during the holiday season. Through this program, we’ll either send your donated fruit to one of the many charities we support, or we’ll happily deliver your case to the local charity of your choice.

Please let us know if you have any questions. And thank you for your business, as it allows us to help others as well. Visit fruitguys.com/mix to see what’s in your case this week and where it comes from.

Happy Holidays!

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

It’s hard to let go of things that were ingrained in my brain as a kid. I still feel nervous if I take food out of the kitchen to eat somewhere other than the table (“not on the rug, Chris!”), and oftentimes I find myself humming an old Sesame Street song from Cookie Monster: “C is for cookie, that’s good enough for me. C is for cookie, that’s good enough for me. Oh! Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C.” Maybe it was the googly-eyed, electric-blue, furry Cookie Monster, or his rough-around-the-edges singing voice, or perhaps the messy enthusiasm with which he ate everything including his own hand–but for whatever reason, that song has stuck in my head.

However, back in 2005, it was announced on Sesame Street that Cookie Monster was recommending that cookies were “sometime food” and that fruit was “anytime food.” The transition song, sung by Hoots the Owl and called “A Cookie is a Sometime Food,” just wasn’t as catchy. Even as a FruitGuy who appreciates the message of fruits and veggies being the core of a healthy diet, I’d have to say that the updated song just didn’t do it for me. Today, if a message can’t be understood in a ringtone, it’s lost. So, Sesame Street—we need a new song. Something catchy that draws on what worked in the past. Here’s my entry. Just put it to the old Cookie Monster song and see what happens:

K is for Kiwi! That’s good enough for me. Hey!
K is for Kiwi! That’s good enough for me. Hey!
K is for Kiwi, full of vitamin C!
Yes, Kiwi, Kiwi, Kiwi has vitamin C!

(I’ll be happy to waive all royalties…)

Kiwis are back and they’re packed with loads of vitamin C. One medium kiwi is only about 45 calories yet has 117% of your daily recommended value of vitamin C. While there are people who eat them whole (skin and all), most folks just eat the inner fruit. One of the easiest ways to eat kiwis in the office is to simply cut them in half widthwise to make two “cups.” Then just spoon out the fruit and devour with the passion of Cookie Monster!

Check fruitguys.com/mix to see this week’s mix.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

My wife is on the East Coast for FruitGuys business, and I’m flying solo. My teen and preteen zombies, formerly known as my children, start rising at 5:45 every morning and usually grunt through the breakfast routine. I’m surprised when my daughter raises an eyebrow (complex motor skills aren’t usually seen at this hour) and asks: “Dad?” “Yes,” I say, while my daughter watches me make a peanut butter and honey sandwich for her lunch. “Um,” she says, looking as I cut the bread less than symmetrically, “when’s Mom coming back?” She smiles. “Here,” I say, grabbing an orange piece of fruit from our case, “Fuyu.”

It must be fall because Fuyu persimmons are back in our mixes. (No, those squat orange things you see in your case are not tomatoes, but lovely and wonderful Fuyus for you!) Fuyus are one of two common types of persimmon. The other is the Hachiya, which we don’t put into our cases. Hachiyas are acorn-shaped pieces of fruit that are definitely not meant to be eaten firm, as they are astringent until they turn mushy. When soft, they taste like sweet fall persimmon pudding.

Fuyus are the only persimmons you’ll see in The FruitGuys’ cases. I eat them like apples—firm, and with a bit of snap. They are tasty and full of vitamins A and C. Their orange color is an indicator of the presence of beta carotene. According to the FDA’s Daily Value guidelines, a large Fuyu persimmon can have as much as 70% of your daily vitamin A requirement, which is pretty darn good.

Persimmons are picked hard and ripen slowly at room temperature. Fuyus can be eaten in various stages of ripeness: from just slightly soft to very soft. Although I don’t usually recommend peeling fruit because that’s where many nutrients reside, I waffle on the Fuyu—some don’t like the naturally waxy exterior, while others love the crunchy texture and sweet infusion it adds. Try a taste with the skin on, and if you don’t like it, peel it. They can be eaten whole, quartered, cut like apple wedges, or sliced into rounds (and keep an eye out, as they sometimes contain a seed or two). The taste will be a very fall-flavored mix of light nutmeg and pumpkin spice. Erik, our COO and triathlete madman, says that he eats the Fuyu for the wonderful aftertaste: “It leaves your mouth refreshed like cantaloupe sorbet.”

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

It was the kind of month that gave a grown man a hangnail—the really nasty kind that snags easily on wool sweaters in dry fall air and requires Neosporin and a superhero Band-Aid. I had been working a case that had me stumped. Ginny Grapefruit had rolled into my office looking for her roots.

“I’m from the citrus family,” she started. “We’re a hardy bunch, but—”

“Yeah,” I interrupted, “I get it, kid. You’re a non-climacteric fruit with parental issues. You ripen gradually, and you usually don’t store sugars as starch. I’ve been around the block. I’ve read this dimestore novel on books-on-tape on CD.” She stared at me, unable to speak.

“You sweeten up while on the tree, too, don’t you? And now you’re wondering where you come from, as if I hold the Rosetta stone to some genealogical interpretive dance. Citrus is one of the most variable and self-hybridizing forms of fruit on the planet, kid. Tracing your roots is about as easy licking your own eyebrows.”

“Well, Mr. Noir,” she said. “I guess you don’t know everything, because I have no eyebrows.” She was right—I was a fool. So I took the case. A month later, I reported back.

“Well, Ginny, it looks like citrus comes from three main family lines: the citron, or Citrus medica; the mandarin orange, or Citrus reticulata; and the pummelo, or Citrus grandis. It turns out that your branch of the family, the grapefruit (Citrus x paradisi), is most likely an accidental hybrid between the pummelo and the orange, and a healthy one at that. It seems your roots go back to the mid-1700s in Barbados, where the Reverend Griffith Hughes, who at the time was trying to locate the origin of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden (or Paradise, hence your genus name), found the grapefruit and thought it was forbidden fruit.” If she’d had eyebrows, they’d have been raised sky-high.

“Your enigmatic common name probably comes from the fact that your kind grows in clusters, like grapes,” I added. “What you should also know is that you have a phenolic compound in you that’s pretty unique and can sometimes interfere with the absorption of certain drugs (some statins, for example). So tell your friends to check their medications to see if they should exclude grapefruit from their diets. For the majority of us (you’ve got fans all over), you’re a healthy part of the day. At 97 calories per cup, and with 50% of the Daily Value of vitamin A, 15% of fiber, and 120% of vitamin C, you’re a good fruit, kid.” She smiled—and that was all the payment I needed.

Check out fruitguys.com/mix to see what’s in your case this week and where it comes from.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

Yes, this is Conference Room A, Building 12. It’s about 10 o’clock in the morning. That’s the  Strategy Squad. They’ve been here since 5 a.m. Something about reassessing their core. Some confusion was reported from one of the other buildings. Maybe it was a gas leak, maybe it was something more. People were outlining themselves on whiteboards and slurping hot coffee out  of cupped hands with stir straws. A guy in the kitchen who had brought his headphones to work  was trying to hook them up to the microwave. “I can hear Saturn!” he screamed. It was the kind of mayhem I had seen before. The Strategy Squad waved me into the meeting. “Thank goodness  you’re here,” they said. “You don’t have to thank goodness,” I replied, “just thank my mother for teaching me to ride a unicycle on the highway in the rain.” They looked confused. I pulled out my mother’s business cards. “You can send thank you notes to her here. Her name is Janice.”

The Squad wanted to know how to help their employees at this time of year. “It’s simple,” I said, walking to the table in the center of the room. On a tray was a pile of donuts. “You guys need to get rid of this bully-lard. Or at least, like Cookie Monster says, make them sometimes snacks—not all the time snacks.” Nobody spoke. “But what will we replace them with?” a young executive finally asked. I pulled out an Asian pear. They gasped. “It’s a looker isn’t it? The round shape, the gorgeous soft brown or yellow skin speckled with tiny little dots? At this time of year we have Asian pears of different varieties in our cases. Asian pears can be eaten firm like apples, but they often have the juice of a ripe pear. You’ll taste hints of butterscotch and wisps of vanilla all packaged up in a healthy and nutritious treat.” They all stared at the Asian pear I held before them. I knew I had to set it down and walk slowly out of the room.

“Just check out fruitguys.com/mix to see what’s in your mix this week,” I added as I inched toward the door. “Our West Coast cases feature Shinseiki and 20th Century Asian pears from Gabriel Farm in Sebastopol, CA—and on the East Coast, some cases include AsaJu Asian pears from Subarashii Kudamono in Coopersburg, PA.”

And remember, if for any reason you’re not satisfied with your FruitGuys fruit, just call or email us. We have a 100% guarantee on what we do.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

It’s a strange feeling when someone dies who affected your life but whom you never knew personally. I’ve found myself grieving over the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (1955–2011). In the early 1980s, I spent countless hours on my family’s Apple IIe playing Time Zone and Dig Dug. I can still remember the “beep!” and quick tapping clicks of the disk drive booting up. I had Jobs’ Time magazine cover pinned above my desk next to a poster of the space shuttle. Beyond the memories of a world that has moved from rotary telephones, through flexible floppy disks, and into the i-connected world we have now, the loss of Steve Jobs feels like the loss of a large piece of American business creativity. I find myself wondering if there will ever again (in my lifetime) be such an inspiring icon of innovation.

What I love most about Jobs’ story is he believed in what he thought was right and proved that, even though exercising that passion may not be pretty or easy, it can bear wonderful results and change the world (see iPod, iPad, etc.). Some writers have noted his ability to see into the future, but what’s really so amazing about Jobs (and so American) is that he didn’t see the future—he made the future happen. It was not preordained or handed to him, it was dreamed and willed. As a business owner, I will continue to be greatly inspired by Jobs.

Passion exists in the fruit world as well as the creative world. We have passion fruit in most of The FruitGuys cases this week, and I want to remind folks of its ripeness rule of thumb: Ugly = Ripe. Passion fruit is a simple and elegant fruit. Purple, smooth, and egg-shaped when young, it mocks you with its mystery: Am I ready? How would you eat me if you could? But passion fruit needs to be shriveled, wrinkly, and aromatic before it is truly ripe. When it looks like you should compost it, that’s the perfect time to cut it in half and scoop out the juice, jelly, and seeds within for a fantastic vitamin C–filled treat. Many regional cases will also feature kiwi berries. A smaller, smooth-skinned cousin to kiwi fruit, these sweet-tarts are eaten whole—but note that if you have any sensitivity to latex, the outer skin of kiwi berries (like the skin of figs) may not sit well with you. If you have any questions, please call or email. You can also check our mix pages at fruitguys.com/mix to see what’s in your case this week.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

I’ve always been a pretty active person—something that made coming down with a random medical condition all the more humbling. About a month ago I had an acute onset of achalasia, an uncommon disorder in which the muscles around the lower esophagus clamp down like a boa constrictor and restrict food and liquid from getting into the stomach. A FruitGuy without the ability to get nutrition— life is pretty ironic. Doctors suspect the condition is caused by a virus that attacks the nerves, but they really don’t know why it happens. I had an operation and am now on the mend and trying to get back into my exercise routine.

Trying to get healthy can be overwhelming and even depressing, especially when you feel you’re starting from scratch. It’s my opinion that at these times we all need a solid touchstone—whether it’s a vision of being healthy in the future or the Rocky theme music playing in our heads, we need to find some way to stave off the tar pit–like inertia that can keep us from making progress on our goals. I found that walking more and walking faster was a great way to shake off my post-surgery inertia and start getting my heart rate up again. From there, I started easing back into my routines. I’ve never been a supporter of the “get rich quick” mentality that grips our culture (both in terms of health and in business). The reality is that for most of us, it’s the consistent accumulation of small steps forward that creates long-term health and success. The key is not giving up.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately as I’ve heard stories from our East Coast farmers whose crops were affected by Hurricane Irene. Some will have a great deal of work to do to recover their farm’s health; others were spared. The impulse to get up again after being knocked down and to take positive steps forward is a good and, I think, very American one.

So as we begin the transition from the height of summer fruit into fall, let’s take notice of the changes nature makes at this time of year. It’s a good time to pause and think about what changes we want to make to our health even if they involve small steps forward. As always, check our mix pages to see what’s in your case this week: fruitguys.com/mix

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

When O’Henry peaches start to appear, I think of O. Henry—the turn-of-the-century American short story writer who wrote The Gift of the Magi, a story about a young married man who sells his watch to buy his newlywed wife a beautiful set of combs for her long hair. Of course at the same time, without knowing what her husband has done, the wife cuts and sells her hair to buy her new husband a watch chain for his now sold timepiece. As the story closes, the narrator says that the two lovers are the wisest of all who give gifts. A hundred years ago, perhaps this story would have made the reader imagine that there is truly selfless love in the world. Today it might make a dual literature and economics major wonder if that love would have ever been realized in a world of credit cards.

While sometimes it seems to me that the simple can get buried in our modern world of convenience, connection, and complexity, eating the O’Henry peach somehow strips away modernity and, if only for a moment, takes us back to a quieter time.

As you bite into the O’Henry peach, you’ll feel its selfless gift as you savor the moment of juicy sweetness dripping down your chin. Perhaps I have overly imaginative taste buds, but I look forward to this time of year when I can experience the rich and lingering hints of vanilla cream under a velvet peach flavor that only the O’Henry provides. You can recognize this fruit from its dark-red color and slightly odd shape. The peach has, for lack of a better term, a slightly protruding peach-proboscis on one end. I recommend letting these peaches soften a day or two until they yield to slight pressure.

O’Henry peaches are, in my mind, the beginning of the unwinding of peach season across the U.S. This means that as we edge into September, the top of the peach experience will start to fall as summer fruit shifts into autumn fruit. So believe in true and selfless fruit love!

Savor the moments as we move toward the end of summer peaches, and as always, please check out our Mix pages to find out exactly what you’re eating and where it was grown (and when the O’Henry’s will hit your region). Just click the ladybug icon at fruitguys.com.

Enjoy & Be Fruitful!

Change has come slowly but steadily to the foods we’ve eaten over the last 70 years. While there has been no acute onset to clearly demonstrate the difference between the food of today and yesterday, if you take a look at local agriculture, you can see the fingerprint of change in all partsof the U.S.

In the 1940s, Northern California’s Sonoma County had thousands of Gravenstein apple orchards. During World War II, American troops were given Gravenstein applesauce and dried Gravenstein apples from the region. This put Sebastopol (the hub of the Gravenstein’s growing region) on the map. Over the years, however, the Gravenstein has waned in popularity. It has a short growing season and doesn’t store for long periods like other more commercially viable apples. Most of its acreage was torn out and replaced with more profitable wine grapes. Today the apples are grown on less than 1,000 acres in Sonoma County. (See the Los Angeles Times’ recent piece, “The Future of Gravenstein Apples Hangs by a Thin Stem“). The slow change to our food culture has made this apple an endangered species.

The Gravenstein is a unique, delicious apple prized for its sweet-tart flavor. It’s considered an heirloom: a wisp of food memory that curls over our senses, leaving us with a culinary tale of yesteryear that starts with a smile and finishes with a bittersweet sigh. Experiencing Gravensteins opens a door into the magic of another time—it’s a world of narrow-gauge railroad track through open orchards; flat-bed trucks holding wide, wooden boxes filled with red-and-green striped apples; the smell of cider and soil on a cool morning under fog-licked blue skies….

You can help save the Gravenstein apple and celebrate its history. The FruitGuys is supporting the last organic growers of Gravenstein apples in Sebastopol by offering a 5-pound box of Gravensteins sent directly to you. Visit fruitguys.com/gravenstein for more information. The boxes are only $20, and shipping may be included, depending on your location. We’re offering them at the height of their season—the weeks of August 15 and August 22. The season is short, so don’t wait.

As always, please check our Mix pages to find out exactly what you’re eating and where it was grown.

Enjoy & be fruitful!