Big melons and assorted produce stories

Check out those melons
Originally uploaded by Brite light photos.

MEZCALES, NAYARIT, Mexico - The fruit stand in Mezcales, a few miles north of Paradise Village Marina has fantastic produce, including this pile of melons.

The local grocery stores have good - and cheap - vegetables and fruit, too. But these outside markets get the stuff right from the fields, sometimes picked within an hour of showing up on the shelves.

The odd thing is that many gringos are leery of buying the fruit from these places, preferring to go into an air-conditioned supermarket, where all the fruit looks like a magazine advertisement (and is sometimes actually shipped in from the U.S. and isdays old).

Go figure that one.

Here vegetables all get soaked in an iodine solution (when you get them back home) to sanitize them. It might not be a bad idea in the states, too, but we somehow trust that the stuff is clean when it comes out of a Safeway.

But there's an irony in that, too.

A lot of the produce in U.S. stores, particularly in California, comes from Mexico.

So there...

mjf