One Man’s Fruit
The only time I can remember grocery shopping as a child was walking through the produce section of a Safeway store in London in the late 1970s. Examining the oranges, my father picked one up and beamed at it as though it were a bar of gold. “See the Jaffa sticker on here,” Elie said, as he pointed to the big and round juicy-looking fruit. “This comes from home. The Europeans are buying our produce.”
Walking through our local supermarket last Friday, the words on this cardboard box leaped out at me, as though my father was again pointing out the same produce to me, to signify our new presence, here in Italy. Dropping my shopping basket, I pulled out my camera, and began taking pictures, hoping to find some aspect of this scene that was worth remembering.
In a city flooded with stickers and flyers urging consumers to boycott Israeli products, you can understand why. Nothing epitomizes the onetime health and naturalness of Israel’s post-colonial economy as the Jaffa orange. In many respects, even though it was long ago superseded by the microchip, the Israeli-branded fruit still carries this significance, as a political symbol. Hence the hand grenade.