For a long time after they first appeared in supermarkets, I was suspicious of seedless grapes, writes Frank McNally
Inconvenient as the seeds used to be, they were central to the whole grape concept as far as I was concerned. It was undeniably pleasant, when eating the new varieties, not to have to spit anything out. But it seemed wrong too, and the tiny nuisances that had been removed from the product were replaced by similarly-sized grains of guilt.
Perhaps this was the vestigial influence of the Bible, in which fruit plays a large and often ominous role. Consider the Book of Genesis, where as early as paragraph 11, God orders the earth to bring forth "the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself". The italicisation of certain words in the Bible often seems completely arbitrary, but that one looks like a deliberate warning to food scientists.
Thereafter, fruit continues to be central to the plot of Genesis: from the apple incident, which you probably remember, to the fig-tree cover-up (". . . and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons"), which you may have forgotten.
It didn't reassure me when I looked up grapes on the internet and read how scientists now "trick" the vine into growing fruit without seeds. Either they fertilise it with pollen that is not entirely compatible, or they spray it with a hormone, so that the vine - this is a quote from one of the science websites - "is fooled into thinking that fertilisation has already occurred".
If the vines are thinking anything, I thought, we should be nervous. Had those meddling scientists never heard of "the grapes of wrath"? Never mind the Bible, it is part of the very definition of a fruit that it must contain its own seed. Which is why that de factovegetable the tomato qualifies as a member of the fruit family, although nobody in his right mind would put it in yoghurt.
And yet despite all this, gradually, I have grown relaxed about the seedless grape, which has now joined that other great labour-saving device - the miniature orange - as a staple in my fruit bowl.
In the modern world, after all, who has time for peeling large oranges any more? On some of them, the peel is so tight-fitting that you have to go back over it a second time to remove the undercoat. Whereas, not only do mandarins and satsumas almost peel themselves, many of them don't have seeds either.
Nobody likes orange pips, even if the phrase "to have the pips" probably refers - according to my Brewers Dictionary- to the poultry disease of that name. But in any case, I am untroubled by the new convenience oranges for another reason.
If, like me, you're a fan of the Godfathermovies, you may know that the appearance of oranges in those films always presages imminent death, or at least an assassination attempt. Don Corleone is buying oranges on the street when he is gunned down and, later, is making faces with orange peel when he has his fatal heart attack. En route to the causeway, Sonny drives past a billboard advertising Florida oranges. Fanucci is eating an orange when the young Corleone shoots him. And so on. If there is a moral in the story, it is either that you should avoid oranges completely, or always choose the quick-peel variety.
I don't think scientists have yet produced a viable seedless apple, but then there hardly seems any point. The apple is already a design classic. Not only are its seeds neatly centralised - unlike those of the hopelessly disorganised water-melon - but they are also contained inside a neat, disposable unit called the "core": a term that itself emphasises the apple's seriousness as a fruit.
The olive - another biblical favourite - is a success story for the opposite reason. The necessity for up-market retailers to remove its stone has allowed the fruit to be fetishised with a wide range of stuffings. Like yoghurt manufacturers who advertise the fruit content rather than the yoghurt, olive sellers often promote the thing that's in it rather than the olive itself. (Maybe this is where the Polo mints people got the idea to go a step further in advertisements, and just promote the hole.)
Then there is the banana, the ultimate convenience fruit, which not only comes seedless, but with its own 100 per cent biodegradable wrapper, so you don't even have to wash it before eating. In fact, wild banana varieties do have seeds, and are inedible as a result. But the one that we know went seedless voluntarily, long before scientists had the idea.
It is thought that about 10,000 years ago, when the Garden of Eden was still wild, a mutation in a banana plant somewhere produced a seedless variety, cloned descendants of which now produce most of the world's edible crop. It is an irony that a fruit notorious for phallic symbolism has not had sex for several millennia. But at any rate, the resultant lack of diversity has become a threat to its existence.
With plants under attack from a range of diseases, the terrible prospect of a future without bananas has reared itself. Total extinction is not likely, but commercial death and disappearance from the supermarket shelves is. It may be that only those meddling scientists can stop it.