Eating the GYD200 tangerine at the start of Guyana 2022

 

The pull of the bright tangerines 

Bourda Market Saturday morning.  I intend not to ask the price of anything I want to buy. I am not a farmer and I do not understand how prices of fruits and vegetables are determined.

Something has gone wrong since the 2021 floods though. The weather has been good for the last few months and the prices continue to be flood time prices.

I am not a farmer. I have no idea what is going on in the farms.  I wonder about the people who might stop eating fruits and vegetables in favour of cheaper things without nutrition. Signs of the prosperity coming with the oil? Where 'organic' and 'fresh' will become fancy and expensive?

The tangerines have the bright well orange/tangerine colour. Man says 5 for a 1000.  Tangerines are my favourite fruit. I know the season has finished and that the Guyana grown tangerines are not usually this colour.  Maybe imported? 

I ask the man for one though, just to get a taste of the tangerine and thinking that of all the other junk I would buy for $200 (the $120 plantain chips is now $140/$160.. etc)

Eating the tangerine..

Come home and peel the tangerine. Waiting for the fragrance that comes out when you are lucky and you get the nice green skin tangerine.  Skin comes off easily, bits of the rind as string. The fegs come off. Juicy. Pop a feg in my mouth and realise that the nice juice tastes is as faint as the time when Christmas tangerines used to give away at 12 for $100 when the US dollar was about the same to the Guyana as now.  

No seeds. 

Something about how the beautiful orange colour thing , juicy even.. looking nice.. but well not tasting like those dancy tangerines from Mabaruma and the nice ones when I am lucky which are so sweet and juicy that you get 'gainst' with the sweetness and then still have the nice fragrance which lingers after.

The tangerine skin, the superficial

The beautiful orange skin though, I don't really want to throw in the rubbish bin. I put at the bottom of the mango tree thinking it will compost. The next day the skin is still beautiful and orange. Thinking of this pull of the beautiful tangerine colour, the superficial.. things look nice but inside they not as nice as they could be.

Thinking of how the oil money and so will bring about the superficial, covering over the not so nice things like the weird food prices, the violence, the lack of accountability , the squabble for the money, the garbage, the intense prejudice and cussing out which is admired and celebrated as free speech.,

There will be more beautiful imported tangerines without taste though coming in.. part of the prosperity were are doomed to enjoy.

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