What's in Your Bowl of Fruit?
Growing up in the 90s, every one of my Asian immigrant relative’s homes hung some form of still life art.
Sometimes they’re flowers, other times they were pensive critters, but more often than not, it’s fruit.
Even the poorest Asian immigrant home has a free calendar from the ethnic grocery store featuring fruit.
Cantaloupes, honeydew, bananas, pineapples, guavas, pears, dragonfruits, lychees, oranges, etc.
Glistening, shimmering, and oh-so-sweet.
Like most customs that seem odd because we no longer practice them, this one’s no exception. Up until the mid 20th century, Western art also featured fruit and food prominently.
Why?
We desire most what we can’t have, and we make art out of what is most on our minds. Back then, sugar was hard to come by, we made art out of high-sugar delicacies.
Yes, fruits were once delicacies.
China’s most notorious concubine, and symbolic embodiment of decadence and decline, Yang Guifei, was said to have loved lychees so much that she misappropriated the imperial emergency horse couriers to bring them to her from across the empire. These couriers rode at breakneck speeds until their horses dropped dead from exhaustion, whereupon they were immediately swapped for fresh mount until they arrived at the capital. Expending horses in this way was a huge waste of public resources and obviously intended only for the most urgent of state emergencies. As with anyone who’s ever splurged on a retail therapy shopping spree, excessive expenditure on frivolity is precisely what luxury is about. Or maybe Guifei just needed lychees that badly.
Judging by our Instagram feeds these days, we’d rather have a cronut. But it doesn’t change what we’re doing: advertising what we desire.
So while it may seem strange to post pics of fruit today, auditing what we’re posting to social can yield profound insight into what we value. Shoes? Cars? Snarky zingers? Our own reflection?
As much as we might think our posts don’t mean anything today, I’m willing to be a lot of us are going to wish we had stuck to something as serene and unremarkable as fruit tomorrow.
What’s in your bowl?