#export fruits to europe

[heritageposts]

🇵🇸 From Friends of Al-Aqsa (FOA):

This Ramadan make sure you’re not breaking your fast with the taste of apartheid. All you need to do is check the label to avoid buying dates from apartheid Israel. This includes dates labelled from Israel, the West Bank and the Jordan Valley or if the country of origin is not shown. Ramadan is a time of reflection and self-improvement. During this month we are more conscious of our actions and how they affect others. Israel is the world’s largest producer of Medjoul dates. Let's be conscious of not buying dates that support Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and apartheid regime. * Major UK supermarkets like ASDA, Tesco, Iceland and Waitrose all sell dates from apartheid Israel as well as local grocery stores * The UK is the second-biggest importer of Israeli dates in Europe 50% of Israeli dates are exported to Europe, where the UK, Netherlands, France, Spain and Italy import huge quantities of the dried fruit. In 2020 the UK imported over 3000 tonnes of dates from Israel, worth roughly 7.5 million pounds. There are two peaks of date consumption in Europe. One is during the month of Ramadan and the other is during New Year’s Eve and Christmas. Boycotting Israeli dates in Ramadan is a concerted community effort that can show we are not powerless. It would be brilliant to see all Israeli dates still left on shelves across the UK and Europe at the end of the blessed month. This would reflect our strength as a community to stand together with a very important message: We will not support the oppression of Palestinians and we will not be complicit in Israeli apartheid. So, this Ramadan #CheckTheLabel and boycott Israeli dates.

With Ramadan approaching, please consider sharing!

If you're in the UK, they also have leaflets available for order on their webpage. These tie into their upcoming campaign #CheckTheLabel, with a national day of action on the 16th of February.

Again, check their webpage for more info.

[txttletale]

I'm asking this genuinely, as a 19 yo with no education in economics and a pretty surface level understanding of socialism: can you explain the whole Bananas discourse in a way someone like me might understand? In my understanding it's just "This is just a product we can give up to create better worker conditions and that's fine" but apparently that's not the full picture?

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!

tldr: it is not imperialism when produce go on boat but it is imperialism when produce grown for dirt cheap by underpaid workers in a country with a devalued currency is then bought and exported and sold by usamerican companies creating huge amounts of economic value of which the nation in which the banana was grown, let alone the people who actually fucking grew it, don't see a cent -- and this is the engine behind the cheap, available-every-day-all-year-everywhere presence of bananas in the usa (and other places!)

[kutputli]

Local country eats most of the local produce it locally grows. oh no the horror

I read an article lamenting how indian mangoes don’t get exported and how bad it is for the economy and how much money we’d make if we could figure out the supply chains as if this country wouldn’t collapse into civil war if in addition to 50°c summers and 10 hr power cuts we had to cope with mangoes becoming unavailable or unaffordable because they’re all being shipped off to whole foods so patricia can pay $15 for one (1) dussehri for her summer salad

[probablyasocialecologist]

In Almería lies the world's largest concentration of commercial greenhouses, often referred to as ‘the sea of plastic’. This vast expanse of polytunnels, housing millions of kilos of fruits and vegetables mainly destined for export, stretches for hundreds of kilometers, a white panorama until the horizon. Also within this sea of plastic dwell the migrant workers who work to ensure Europe's supermarkets are stocked year-round. While they perform the vital task of ensuring Europe's all-season access to fresh produce, these workers often live in a state of physical and institutional vulnerability. This state of affairs remained largely hidden, until recent shocks like the Covid-19 pandemic and armed conflicts exposed the fragility of our food supply chains. Spain issues approximately 150,000 permits annually for seasonal laborers (European Parliament 2021). However, within just the province of Almería, there are more than 100,000 migrants working in greenhouses, 80% of them holding undocumented status in the country. This lack of legal recognition leaves the workers off official records, denying them universal rights such as labour rights and access to formal rental contracts. It is a dire situation that forces many to call the shanty towns surrounding the greenhouses their homes. During my research, I often heard how some workers pay up to 6,000 euros annually to greenhouse managers for the working contracts necessary to seek legal status in the country, turning the quest for legalization into a profitable business.  Almería serves as a primary entry point for migrants traveling from West and North African countries to Europe. For those who cross the Mediterranean without visas - the majority of greenhouse laborers - this work is virtually the only option for income generation on arrival. While informal greenhouse jobs provide financial support to workers and their families back in their home countries, they also perpetuate vulnerability in livelihoods and employment, highlighting and embedding a stark contrast between EU citizens enjoying affordable food and the undocumented migrant workers compelled to work in precarious conditions to provide it.

[gothhabiba]

The occupation [of Palestine] has [...] witnessed a process of economic integration without parallel political integration or representation. The OPT [occupied Palestinian territories] are highly dependent on Israel for basic goods and consistently run a trade deficit with Israel. Citrus from the OPT for example is exported to Europe through Israel and then sold back to the Palestinians as processed juices and preserves because no facilities exist to process the raw materials. Almost all of the OPT agricultural imports come from Israel, and are either grown there or imported through Israeli firms. A UN study in the-mid 1980s showed that 50 percent of Palestinian imports from Israel had been produced domestically prior to the occupation (Awartani, 1993).

Palestinians procure from Israel some 90 to 100 thousand tons of fruits and vegetables annually (Awartani, 1993). While a small portion of these exports are produce not grown locally, most are products with which the OPT suffers from severe surpluses, yet are offered cheaper by the subsidized Israeli market. Meanwhile 5,000 tons of fresh fruit and vegetables are exported to Israel and around 40,000 tons of oranges are exported to Israel juice processing factories. Therefore, the physical agricultural trade deficit of the OPT to Israel is in the range of 40,000 to 70,000 tons. This fluctuates as Israel uses the OPT as a buffer to fill shortages and stabilize prices. Israel is highly selective about what it allows across the green line and its practice of holding up agricultural produce has a crippling effect on local farmers.

Due to the high levels of subsidization of Israeli agriculture, Palestinian growers operate with considerable comparative disadvantages. For example, in 1981 the total value of Israeli government subsidies to agriculture equaled $1.5 billion – equivalent to twice the total value of agricultural output for that year (Awartani, 1993). The unique perception of the role of agriculture in building the State has been expressed in generous support programs covering all aspects of production and marketing and the full range of services supportive to agricultural development.

Israel also helps regulate risk, regulates supply through marketing boards and promotes agricultural exports. Israel’s subsidies, particularly cheap water, are particularly damaging to Palestinian agriculture, and enervating, due to the fact that the 90% of the water of the (inequitably) shared Mountain aquifer resources originates as rainwater in the West Bank. Presently, more than 85% of the Palestinian water from the West Bank aquifers is taken by Israel, accounting for 25.3% of Israel’s water needs. While subsidy levels have been decreasing since the 1980s, Israel has devised other means of restraining Palestinian agricultural activity. Chief among these is the permit system. For example military order No. 1015 (Aug. 27, 1982) gave the power to authorities to require permission for the planting of fruit trees other than that for personal consumption.

– 2009. Leah Temper, “Creating Facts on the Ground: Agriculture in Israel and Palestine (1882-2000),” Historia Agraria 48, pp. 75-110.

[calabria-mediterranea]

The IGP lemons of Rocca Imperiale, Calabria, Italy

Rocca Imperiale is particularly pleasant because it’s not just a seaside resort but also a genuine old Calabrian small town high up on a panoramic promontory about 200 meters above sea level. With a population of 3,500, the village is the gate to Calabria on the Basilicata border, yet just a 50-minute drive from Matera, Basilicata.

The lemon of Rocca Imperiale is as succulent as that from Sorrento. It earned its own Protected Geographical Indication recognition (IGP) and is sold on the mainland and exported to Northern Europe.

Naturally, such fruit is not waxed, and if you finely pare or grate its skin, you will release its intensely lemony aromatic oils. Rocca Imperiale's lemons are very rich in limonene that confers a sweet taste and intense scent.

Follow us on Instagram, @calabria_mediterranea

[balkanradfem]

"Growing flax to make linen was one of the oldest human activities in Europe, particularly in the Rhineland. Archeologists have found linen textiles among the settlements of Neolithic cultivators along the shores of Lake Neuchâtel in the Jura Mountains west of Bern, Switzerland. These were elaborate pieces: Stone Age clothmakers of the Swiss lakeshores sewed pierced fruit pits in a careful line into a fabric with woven stripes. The culture spread down the Rhine and into the lowland regions.

The Roman author Pliny observed in the first century AD that German women wove and wore linen sheets. By the ninth century flax had spread through Germany. By the sixteenth century, flax was produced in many parts of Europe, but the corridor from western Switzerland to the mouth of the Rhine contained the oldest region of large-scale commercial flax and linen production. In the late Middle Ages the linen of Germany was sold nearly everywhere in Europe, and Germany produced more linen than any other region in the world.

At this juncture, linen weavers became victims of an odd prejudice. “Better skinner than linen weaver,” ran one cryptic medieval German taunt. Another macabre popular saying had it that linen weavers were worse than those who “carried the ladders to the gallows.” The reason why linen weavers were slandered in this way, historians suspect, was that although linen weavers had professionalized and organized themselves into guilds, they had been unable to prevent homemade linen from getting onto the market. Guilds appeared across Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries but many of the items they produced for exchange, like textiles and soap, were also produced at home right up through the nineteenth century. The intricate regulations of the guilds—determining who could join, how they would be trained, what goods they would produce, and how these could be exchanged—were mainly designed to distinguish guild work from this homely labor. That linen making continued to be carried out inside of households—a liability for guilds in general—lent a taint to the linen guild in particular.

In the seventeenth century, guilds came under pressure from a new, protocapitalist mode of production. Looking for cheaper cloth to sell on foreign markets, entrepreneurs cased the Central European countryside offering to pay cash to home producers for goods. Rural households became export manufacturing centers and a major source of competition with the guilds. These producers could undercut the prices of urban craftsmen because they could use the unregulated labor of their family members, and because their own agricultural production allowed them to sell their goods for less than their subsistence costs.

The uneasiness between guild and household production in the countryside erupted into open hostility. In the 1620s, linen guildsmen marched on villages, attacking competitors, and burning their looms. In February 1627 Zittau guild masters smashed looms and seized the yarn of home weavers in the villages of Oderwitz, Olbersdorf, and Herwigsdorf.

Guilds had long worked to keep homemade products from getting on the market. In their death throes, they hit upon a new and potent weapon: gender. Although women in medieval Europe wove at home for domestic consumption, many had also been guild artisans. Women were freely admitted as masters into

the earliest medieval guilds, and statutes from Silesia and the Oberlausitz show that women were master weavers. Thirteenth-century Paris had eighty mixed craft guilds of men and women and fifteen female-dominated guilds for such trades as gold thread, yarn, silk, and dress manufacturing. Up until the mid-seventeenth century, guilds had belittled home production because it was unregulated, nonprofessional, and competitive. In the mid-seventeenth century this work was identified as women’s work, and guildsmen unable to compete against cheaper household production tried to eject women from the market entirely. Single women were barred from independent participation in the guilds. Women were restricted to working as domestic servants, farmhands, spinners, knitters, embroiderers, hawkers, wet nurses. They lost ground even where the jobs had been traditionally their own, such as ale brewing and midwifery, by the end of the seventeenth century.

The wholesale ejection of women from the market during this period was achieved not only through guild statute, but through legal, literary, and cultural means. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women lost the legal right to conduct economic activity as femes soles. In France they were declared legal “imbeciles,” and lost the right to make contracts or represent themselves in court. In Italy, they began to appear in court less frequently to denounce abuses against them. In Germany, when middle-class women were widowed it became customary to appoint a tutor to manage their affairs. As the medieval historian Martha Howell writes, “Comedies and satires of this period…often portrayed market women and trades women as shrews, with characterizations that not only ridiculed or scolded them for taking on roles in market production but frequently even charged them with sexual aggression.” This was a period rich in literature about the correction of errant women: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1590–94), John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1629–33), Joseph Swetnam’s “The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women” (1615). Meanwhile, Protestant reformers and Counter-Reformation Catholics established doctrinally that women were inherently inferior to men.

This period, called the European Age of Reason, successfully banished women from the market and transformed them into the sweet and passive beings that emerged in Victorian literature. Women accused of being scolds were paraded in the streets wearing a new device called a “branks,” an iron muzzle that depressed the tongue. Prostitutes were subjected to fake drowning, whipped, and caged. Women convicted of adultery were sentenced to capital punishment.

As a cultural project, this was not merely recreational sadism. Rather, it was an ideological achievement that would have lasting and massive economic consequences. Political philosopher Silvia Federici has argued this expulsion was an intervention so massive, it ought to be included as one of a triptych of violent seizures, along with the Enclosure Acts and imperialism, that allowed capitalism to launch itself.

Part of why women resisted enclosure so fiercely was because they had the most to lose. The end of subsistence meant that households needed to rely on money rather than the production of agricultural goods like cloth, and women had successfully been excluded from ways to earn. As labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris has argued, “In pre-industrial societies, nearly everybody worked, and almost nobody worked for wages.” During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monetary relations began to dominate economic life in Europe. Barred from most wage work just as the wage became essential, women were shunted into a position of chronic poverty and financial dependence. This was the dominant socioeconomic reality when the first modern factory, a cotton-spinning mill, opened in 1771 in Derbyshire, England, an event destined to upend still further the pattern of daily life."

- Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

[whencyclopedia]

Rationing in Wartime Britain

Rationing of food, clothing, petrol, and other essential items was introduced in Britain during the Second World War (1939-45) when the country's imports were severely threatened by German U-boat attacks on merchant shipping in the Atlantic Ocean, North Sea, and English Channel. Citizens were issued with ration books of coupons which they could spend at retailers to ensure that everyone had access to a minimum of essentials but nobody could buy in excess of restricted amounts.

While some staples like bread, fruit, and vegetables were never rationed, plenty of other necessities were so that meals became simpler and more monotonous. Rationed items included meat, sugar, butter, cheese, tea, and soap. The government also encouraged people to use cheap restaurants by exempting them and their customers from any rationing. Although a black market developed where people illegally bought goods that were otherwise rationed, the ration system worked largely thanks to everyone's self-regulation.

Short Supplies

Pre-war Britain was heavily dependent on many imported goods, which came by ship from around the British Empire, North and South America, and other trading nations. Now during the war, merchant shipping came under serious threat from German U-boats as they headed to and from Britain. Another threat to supplies came from the German bombing of major British ports and the East End docks in London. With Western and Central Europe occupied by the enemy, Britain's access to goods produced there was cut off. In 1941, Britain's exports were two-thirds lower than before the war. Another blow to supplies came when Japan occupied parts of the British Empire in the East from 1942. In addition to these limits, the government's approach to total war meant that many resources had to be diverted to the war effort such as weapons manufacturing and transportation, further limiting resources that might otherwise have been used to support the market for domestic goods.

In order to ensure certain essential items remained available to the widest number of citizens, rationing was introduced, a policy that had been used in the First World War (1914-18). Food prices were controlled from November 1939. Petrol was rationed from September 1939. From the first months of 1940, meat, butter, and sugar were rationed. From June 1941, clothes were rationed in response to a dramatic rise in prices. Soap was rationed from February 1942 and became one of the most popular presents for Christmas that year.

There "is ample evidence that such controls, to help win the war, were not resented" (Dear, 882), and there was the benefit that people felt rationing, applied to everyone, was helping make British society less unequal as everyone pulled together in times of trouble.

Continue reading...

[flourescencia]

I want all of you to know that the governments in Costa Rica are and have been perfectly fine with poisoning, sickening and killing their people. They have been letting our water get contaminated with agrochemicals, many of them produced in Europe but forbidden to use across all of the European Union because they are so harmful for humans to consume them, but they are okay with selling it to poorer third world countries like ourselves.

We're also the number one country with the biggest use of pesticides, placing us above the United States and China even though we are made up of only 5 million people, and this other countries are respectively made up of 324 million and 1412 million. Stomach cancer is the number one cause of death by cancer in this country and we're placed at #11 worldwide for incidence of stomach cancer. Recent news reports are saying cases of stomach cancer might increase 77% by 2040.

The companies here (many of them foreign or transnational) dedicated to cultivating fruits dump these agrochemicals into our rivers, so not only does water become toxic to drink, you should also not shower with it. The truth is some people are not being provided with drinking water so they are still nonetheless making use of it.

A recent study reported that in the canton of Alvarado in Cartago, out of 90 people interviewed 70% of them had either a relative sick with stomach cancer, or they themselves had it.

Most studies agree that the reason why stomach cancer is so prevalent is because of the use of these chemicals and how they end up in our water thanks to these companies; the government is willing to do nothing about it because they love their profit far more than they care about the citizens even though they KNOW what is happening. So far there have been at least two cases in different provinces of several school children and teachers suffering mass intoxication and it's heavily implied it was due to these chemicals.

I also want you all to know a reason why the use of these chemicals is so intensive is because we export these fruits to Europe so they can all enjoy them for the cheap but the ones who most suffer the consequences of this are those of us living here.

The most twisted of all is how our government could easily ban the use of these chemicals and instill protocols for the proper disposal of them but they evidently won't do it because it implies codemning the actions of the companies and they are disgusting people who would much rather see their profit over the health of the people they allegedly work for.

[arsacra]

9 matchbox labels printed in 1969 for the Czechoslovak consumer cooperative chain Jednota. They advertise the goods and services that co-op members can recieve like fresh produce (1, and fresh and dried mushrooms 6), wine (8), nutricious foods (3), stores close to residential neighborhoods (2) and new locations (4), and co-op owned hotels and roadside bars for motoroturism(5, 7). The last label boasts 1,800,000 members of the co-op.

The matchboxes were produced by Solo Lipnik (now Morago AS Ltd) to be glued onto wooden matchboxzes, but collecting the designs was highly popular and there were many unions and clubs dedicated to collecting labels. These labels were designed by Jednota to promote the cooperative, but other designs were commissioned by various government and social organizations to promote public health and safety, agriculture, labor, and of course, matches.

In 1969, the Jednota co-op expanded into the tourism sector with TATRATOUR, a travel cooperative. Also in the 60s, Jednota exported honey, forest fruits, mushrooms, and snails to western Europe in order to have an account of foreign currency to import certain goods and industrial parts. However, many goods sold in Jednoka stores were domestic - local honey and fruits from the rural areas, and bread and pastries produced in Jednoka facilities (but production flucuated thanks to government interventions). By the 80s the co-op also expanded to include household goods, health and beauty items, and other non-grocery items as smaller specialty stores were overtaken by larger stores that sold a larger variety of items. (COOP Jednota still exists today in SL. source translated from Slovak. Translation notes welcome!)

[fouryearsofshades]

A Market Stall in Batavia, Andries Beeckman (attributed to), Albert Eckhout (rejected attribution), c. 1640 - c. 1666 

The Dutch and Malay inscriptions on the piece of paper in the lower right corner identify this as a Dutch painting of subjects studied on the spot. Most of the fruit varieties are found only in Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies, and were not exported to Europe at the time. The combination of figures from different countries suggests that the setting is most probably the very cosmopolitan Batavia, modern-day Jakarta.8 A Chinese merchant, recognizable as such from his distinctive goatee, moustache and remarkably long fingernails, is counting coins in a fruit stall set off with bamboo partitions. Standing on the left is a woman wearing a typically Javanese sarong and kebaya and holding a small cigar in one hand while placing a durian upright with the other. A second Javanese woman in the middle is lifting a small bundle of leaf wrappers out of a small Japanese lacquered casket, probably betel leaves. A boy behind her is picking a banana from the bunch hanging on the right. A striking salmon-crested cockatoo (Cacatua moluccensis) is perched on the bamboo screen at the back.

Andries Beeckman went to great lengths to depict the huge diversity of tropical fruit as faithfully as possible, but he was clearly not a professional still-life painter. The different varieties are easily distinguished, but their textures are not convincing. Laid out on the table – some with numbers matching the list on the piece of paper (the latter are given between brackets below) – are, on the far left, from top to bottom, rambutans (Nephelium lappaceum, no. 1), langsats (Lansium domesticum, no. 3) and starfruit (Averrhoa carambola, no. 2). Beside them are a partly cut pomelo (Citrus maxima, no. 4) and durians, one of them sliced (Durio, no. 5). The three small pieces of red fruit at bottom left are water or Malay apples (Syzygium aqueum or Syzygium malaccense, no. 6) or Java apples (Syzygium samarangense), and lying to their right are mangoes (Mangifera indica, no. 7) and pineapples (Ananas comosus, no. 8). Below the two pineapples in the centre are jackfruit, one halved (Artocarpus Heteropyllus, no. 9) and several small mangosteens, some opened (Garcinia mangostana, no. 10). On the right are bananas (no. 11), five coconuts and a halved one (Cocos nucifera), and at the very front cashew apples (Anacardium occidentale). The fruit cut in two in the Japanese casket is probably a sort of lime called a Calamondin orange (Citrofortunella microcarpa).

The Rijksmuseum painting is a reduced version of a canvas from an anonymous series of scenes of foreign peoples and produce that decorated the walls of Schloss Pretzsch an der Elbe in Saxony until 1828 (fig. a).9 In the nineteenth century they were removed, first to Berlin and then to Schloss Schwedt an der Oder in Brandenburg.10 They were seen there in the 1930s by Thomsen, who rather hesitantly attributed them to Albert Eckhout and dated them around the middle of the seventeenth century.11 Schwedt was completely destroyed in the closing days of the Second World War, and all that is left of the works of art are pre-war black-and-white photographs making it clear that the attribution to Eckhout is untenable.12

The connection with the canvas from Schloss Pretzsch also led to this Market Stall in Batavia being wrongly attributed to Eckhout or his circle in the past.13 It is woodenly executed, compositionally clumsy, and is not of the kind of Brazilian subject for which Eckhout is known. Minor differences between the two paintings show that they were not copied after each other but seem to share the same or a similar source. The way in which the fruit and cockatoo are depicted displays a clear resemblance to the only known still life by Andries Beeckman (fig. b), and, interestingly, one of the scenes from the series in Pretzsch castle was definitely based on watercolours by him,14 so the present canvas could also be by Beeckman or someone from his circle.

Very little is known about the picture’s provenance, although there are a few early records of an Indonesian fruit market, and since A Market Stall in Batavia is the only surviving work of that nature there is a great temptation to associate it with those early sources. There is, however, nothing that can be said for certain. Around 1660 Jan Vos wrote an ode about paintings in the collection of Joan Huydecooper, among them an ‘East Indies fruit market’: ‘Who has driven me from the north to the east? / I find myself in the market of the East Indies coast. / Here nature displays her fruit as food for life. / The sight makes my mouth desire the beautiful harvest, / Thus is my stomach now sorely overburdened. / Greedy eyes are not soon satiated’.15 It may well be that the poet was referring to the Rijksmuseum canvas.16 There is a second mention of an ‘East Indies fruit market’ a little later in the collection of burgomaster Mattheus van den Broucke of Dordrecht.17 It is far from obvious that it refers to this Market Stall in Batavia. His picture was one of a series of which the others were described as ‘One ditto, with East Indies animals and fruit’, ‘One ditto, being East Indies lodgings, ‘One ditto’, ‘Three ditto, East Indies women’ and ‘A Moorish woman’.18 It is very possible that the Rijksmuseum painting was also part of a larger ensemble of that kind.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

[mirtadraws]

This year's #Inktober is about #Palestine.

Day 13: Jaffa oranges are named after Jaffa, which is their main center of production. This cultivar was developed by Palestinians during the Ottoman rule in the Levant. After the Nakba, the percentage of Arabic population of Jaffa declined, and today the ownership, production, export and branding of these oranges is Israeli. Israel exports citrus and other fruits to Europe, check before you buy produce. For example, my local supermarket offers dates from Israel and dates from Morocco. Don't forget to check where stuff comes from before buying it.

PS if "Jaffa" sounds familiar to you but you can't remember where from, it's probably from Jaffa cakes.

[ceevee5]

“On 31 October, after four postponements to get infrastructure in place, the UK will finally introduce checks on fresh and chilled food imports. The EU has already introduced its checks, which come with a vast amount of paperwork and significant costs. The impact on the export of fruit from the UK to the EU has been dramatic, reducing the value from £248.5m in 2021 to £113.8m by 2023, a drop of more than 50%. Now it’s going to work the other way. EU producers of meat products wishing to export to the UK will have to employ a vet to certify their goods, which will cost up to €700 a time. All sectors will have to employ agents for data entry compliance which could add another €200. They will have to train themselves on the paperwork. Then, come January, there’s the border inspection charge of up to £43 for each consignment regardless of whether it’s physically inspected or not. Faced by all of this, thousands of small producers from across Europe who have kept this country supplied with a fabulously diverse range of quality products will simply decide it’s not worth the trouble. They’ll sell elsewhere. The quality of our lives will be diminished.”

[rabbitcruiser]

World Coconut Day

Discover the tropical taste and versatility of this round, hairy fruit with a hard shell. From coconut water to oil, there's so much to love about them!

A popular fruit consumed around the world, the coconut is healthy and tasty, and it grows in tropical regions. World Coconut Day celebrates everything that has to do with this delicious and nutritious fruit!

History of World Coconut Day

Coconuts are a food that humans have found sustenance in for at least 2,000 years. Probably native to Indonesia, the name coconut translates to “walnut from India”. While coconuts would have traveled throughout the Indian subcontinent and even to Africa in the early years, they didn’t make it to Europe until some time around the 16th century.

It is likely that coconuts were introduced to Europeans through the Maritime Silk Road, which connected the East with the West. Marco Polo may have been one of the many travelers and explorers who would have brought coconuts back with them.

When the Asia Pacific Coconut Community (APCC) was founded in 1969, it was created in an attempt to help support and promote the tropical countries that are high in growing, producing, selling and exporting coconuts. Located in Jakarta, Indonesia, this group stays connected with the production and export of coconuts. Sharing scientific expertise and coordinating activities within the industry, the members of the APCC are responsible for the growth of more than 90% of the coconuts produced and sold all over the globe.

Founded in 2009, World Coconut Day was started by the Asia and Pacific Coconut Community to promote the activities of coconut growers while raising awareness about the fruit for those outside of the growing community.

The celebration of World Coconut Day offers plenty of opportunities for this important product of the Asia-Pacific region to enter into the forefront of conversation of people around the world!

World Coconut Day Timeline

1st Century BC

Coconuts are present in Indian subcontinent 

Historical records from Sri Lanka show that coconuts existed before this time.

16th Century

Coconuts are introduced to Europe 

Arriving as many exotic foods did, through the Maritime Silk Road, Europeans were exposed to coconuts through traders like Marco Polo.

1946

Almond Joy candy bar hits the scene 

This candy bar combines the sweetness of shredded coconut with an almond and then covers it in delicious milk chocolate.

2004

Vita Coco introduces coconut water 

Offering a delicious and nutritious beverage, Vita Coco begins a trend of bottling coconut water and making it commercially available.

2009

World Coconut Day is first celebrated 

Started by the Asia-Pacific Coconut Community, World Coconut Day aims to raise awareness and bring harmony to the growth and distribution of coconuts.

How to Celebrate World Coconut Day

Getting involved with World Coconut Day is easy – all it takes is tasting and enjoying this delicious fruit. Consider some of these ideas to celebrate the day:

Enjoy Eating a Coconut

Some people who haven’t grown up around this delicious fruit might be intimidated by its brown, hairy shell. But once it is broken into and the creamy white flesh is exposed, it is a fragrant delight to behold.

First, start by poking a hole in the coconut at the end near the ‘eye’, where the shell is the thinnest. Use a screwdriver or hammer with a clean nail to make the hole. This will allow for the water of the coconut to be drained.

Pro Tip: Strain the coconut water through a cheesecloth and into a cup, and then drink it up!

Once the juice has been drained out of the coconut, one of the easiest ways to break open the fruit is by using a handsaw to cut it in half. Other people might want to simply put it into a sturdy bag and bang it against a stone or concrete until it breaks. This method is a bit messy, but it works.

Once the coconut is open, remove the meat from the shell and enjoy eating it fresh!

Cook or Bake with Coconut

One way to enjoy National Coconut Day without having to go to the trouble of cracking open the fruit is by purchasing the coconut in bags that are shredded or chipped. These are often pre-sweetened and ready to be used in recipes. Since the fruit is a tropical one, and the day falls at the end of the summer, many recipes are cool and refreshing.

Consider cooking or baking with some of these recipe ideas to celebrate the day:

Coconut Cream Pie. This classic pie contains coconut flakes or chips, coconut milk, heavy cream and eggs, and is topped with mounds of sweet whipped cream.

Coconut Ice Cream. This refreshing dessert is so simple, all it needs is 6 ingredients: whipping cream, sugar, vanilla, milk, salt and, of course, shredded coconut.

Coconut Milk Pudding. This delicious recipe is similar to the consistency of flan, but is made with coconut milk, gelatin, mango, butter, grated coconut, condensed milk and other simple ingredients.

Coconut Rice Pudding. A special blend of coconut milk and rice, this dessert is delicious when served with a homemade rhubarb compote or jam. The coconut and rhubarb flavors just meld together on the tongue!

Drink a Piña Colada

A classic tropical drink, the piña colada contains delicious ingredients like pineapple juice, coconut cream, rum, lime juice and ice, all blended together into a delicious frozen beverage. Throw the ingredients in a blender at home and mix it up. Garnish with a drink umbrella and skewer with red cherries for a vibrant presentation.

Try Out Some Coconut Water

A fairly new product on the market, bottled coconut water can be found in many places around the world now. Coconut water is actually the juice or liquid that comes from young coconut plants. Some brands of coconut water that might be worth trying out in celebration of National Coconut Day include Vita Coco, ZICO, Naked Coconut Water, and C2O.

Listen to Some Coconut Themed Music

One fun way to enjoy National Coconut Day is to enjoy a few songs that were written around the theme of coconuts. Try out some of these ideas to get started making a tropical playlist just for this day:

Coconut by Harry Nillson (1971). Probably the most famous song about coconuts, the lyrics are “put de lime in de coconut and drink ‘em both togedder”.

Cocoanut Woman by Harry Belafonte (1957). Released on his album called “Belafante sings of the Caribbean”, this song is about a lady on the island who is selling coconut water.

Coconut Telegraph by Jimmy Buffet (1981). Appearing as the title song on the album of the same name, this song speaks of a Tuesday on the island when information and gossip is exchanged.

I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts by Merv Griffin (1950). With lyrics that make a story out of a coconut toss at a fair, this song is a silly and playful classic from a bygone era.

World Coconut Day FAQs

Is coconut a fruit?

Even though it has the word “nut” in the name, coconut is a fibrous, one-seeded fruit that falls into the drupe, or stone fruit family.

Is coconut oil good for you?

Yes. Coconut oil has a variety of nutrients that are healthy when consumed by humans, including fatty acids, healthy cholesterol, ketones and more.

Do coconuts grow on palm trees?

While coconuts do grow on a certain type of palm tree, not all palm trees are coconut trees.

Is coconut water good for you?

Coconut water offers many healthy benefits, including electrolytes, magnesium, potassium, antioxidants and more.

Should coconut oil be refrigerated?

Coconut oil is long-lasting, up to two years, and does not need to be refrigerated.

Source

[todaysjewishholiday]

23 Menachem Av 5784 (26-27 August 2024)

The 23rd of Av is the yahrzeit of the philosopher and activist Simone Weil, whose life and death reveal a great deal about the specific cultural milieu of secular Jews in Europe between the world wars. Weil’s Jewishness is complicated by her secular upbringing and her complex engagement with Christianity near the end of her life, but it is her Jewishness in particular that I intend to explore here.

Weil’s father was an Alsatian Jew, whose surname was a product of the wave of Jewish assimilation into French national identity following Napoleon’s emancipation of French Jews. Offered full citizenship rights but still subject to significant interpersonal antisemitism for any recognizable markers of Jewish identity, some French Jews traded clearly Jewish names for newly chosen ones— some of which were still able to signal Jewish identity to other Jews. Weil was one such name, selected by certain French Levi’s as an anagram (W being pronounced in both French and German as V is pronounced in English). Weil’s mother was a Russian Jew whose family had immigrated to Belgium to escape the cycle of pogroms which followed Czar Alexander II’s assassination. Her father accrued significant wealth as an import-export magnate, a large part of which he left to his daughter. Weil’s paternal grandparents were both religiously devout, and deeply distressed by their son’s turn to agnosticism and a secular identity (and particularly his abandonment of kashrus). Her maternal grandparents were less intently religious, but her maternal grandfather was not only fluent in Hebrew but composed Hebrew language poetry, and his widow lived with the Weil family until her death. Both Simone’s parents were deeply intelligent and well educated. Salomea (or Selma, as she preferred to be known) Weil had also wished to be a medical doctor but had been dissuaded by her father, so she settled for marrying a doctor instead. She poured all of her intensity into ensuring the best possible education for her children, Simone and André. The entire family were bibliophiles, and to provide intellectual stimulation to their children Salomea and Bernard Weil also introduced games such as speaking only in rhyming couplets or conducting dinner conversation in one of the family’s several other shared languages. They regularly discussed current events and political theory in the home and Simone became an avowed leftist activist at an early age. Like her husband, Salomea eschewed all Jewish religious practice, but their home life and general cultural outlook will be familiar to many within the Ashkenazi diaspora.

Bernard and Selma’s secularism was also of a distinctly Jewish variety. A significant portion of European Jewry in the fifty eighth century of the Hebrew calendar were deeply attached to the concept of secular culture specifically as an alternative to Christian hegemony, and an escape route from the persistent and violent antisemitism that was such a consistent aspect of Jewish life in Christian Europe. The brutally violent antisemitism of the modern secular governments of Europe, both fascist and communist, had yet to destroy Jewish hopes in secularism as an antidote to prejudice. And the rationalism of European secularism also appealed significantly to Jewish communities that emphasized scholarly pursuits and valued logical reasoning. And the emancipation of Jews which had been a fruit of enlightenment ideals in Christian nations gave Jews the newfound possibility of assimilation into the cultural mainstream without conversion to Christianity. Haskalah and the Reform movement both developed during this period of hopefulness of greater inclusion, and while many Jews, like Simone Weil’s parents, decided to jettison religion entirely, theirs was often a particularly culturally Jewish expression of secularism. This was the mold from which Simone’s childhood was cast. Weil’s parents had experienced antisemitism firsthand throughout their early years and were determined to shield their children from it, and who like many of their secular Jewish contemporaries made the pursuit of knowledge and of progressive social reform its own kind of sacred duty.

Simone’s own early dedication to activism is revealed in an anecdote from her childhood, where after striking up conversations with workers at the resort where her family was vacationing and learning more about their wages and the conditions in which they worked, attempted to persuade them to unionize. She determined early on to devote herself entirely to the cause of a more just world, and did so with a relentlessness that led her college classmates in philosophy to dub her “the categorical imperative in skirts” (It is worth noting that she was the sole female student in her cohort at the time). Weil was deeply impatient with the abstract inquiries of other philosophers, forcefully declaring that “one thing alone mattered in the world today: the revolution that would feed all people on earth” to Simone de Beauvoir. When the latter replied that meaning mattered more than material comfort, Weil retorted “It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry.”

Hunger was something that Weil herself knew well. Despite her affluent and indulgent upbringing, she lived a rigorous life of extreme self-denial driven by the belief that she did not deserve to be comfortable while others were suffering. As a young child during the First World War, she refused all sweets after hearing of the deprivations of troops on the front. As Weil grew, she also regularly refused other food, due to a mixture of sensory issues, fears about germs, and moral scrupulosity about the injustice of eating well while others starved. This last trait— of being certain that she ought not to have any comfort which was denied to others— made all social injustices deeply personal matters for Simone. She never learned the art of looking away from other’s suffering that enables a sense of complacency about the state of society, nor did she ever attempt to persuade herself that others deserved their misery.

During her university years, Weil, who had first identified herself as a Bolshevik at the age of 10, persuaded her parents to host Leon Trotsky briefly early in his exile from the Soviet Union. Reportedly, the budding moral philosopher was one of the few people able to silence the revolutionary firebrand in a debate.

Simone’s childhood acts of labor solidarity were also only the first signs of things to come. While many college students enjoyed theorizing about the sufferings of the working class, Weil participated regularly in union demonstrations and preferred the company of striking workers to that of her fellow students. This continued for the rest of her life, and led to the most targeted antisemitic pushback she was to personally experience, as her committed labor activism and extreme commitment to social egalitarianism were interpreted by the conservative press as proof of their theory of Jewish Bolshevism, with educated radical Jews stirring up a laboring class that in the eyes of conservatives clearly would otherwise be perfectly accepting of miserable conditions and pay. Weil eventually became convinced that solidarity with the working class was not sufficient, and that to truly understand the struggle she should become a laborer. To this end she quit her post as an instructor and worked backbreaking shifts on an automobile assembly line, which persuaded her that the physically and mentally draining conditions of modern labor were the greatest obstacle to revolutionary action. The same convictions about direct action and self sacrifice led her to join an anarchist faction in the Spanish Civil War, though her poor eyesight and lack of physical coordination made her more of a liability than an asset in combat. A severe injury in a cookfire accident led to her departure from Spain for medical recovery, and her unit was nearly entirely massacred a month after her departure.

It was in the aftermath of her horrendous and personally devastating experiences in Spain, wracked with survivor’s guilt and a a persistently frustrated desire to sacrifice her own life for a worthy cause, that Weil’s parents took her on holiday in the Italian village of Assisi in an attempt to bouy her spirits, and she wandered into the basilica, where the Catholic Saint Francis had renounced all earthly possessions, and offered up a prayer for the first time in her life. It seems that that root of Weil’s interest in Christianity was the way its most praised figures and its founder and central figure practiced and promoted the exact kind of unrelenting self denial and self abnegation that she herself sought. Another observation of hers, upon seeing a peasant religious procession in Portugal, is telling: “the conviction was suddenly borne in upon me that Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.” While at description of Christianity as a religion of slaves was popular among European secularists of all backgrounds, there is a particularly Jewish tradition of associating Christianity with bondage in contrast to Judaism’s emphasis on collective liberation. But Weil, who was certain that she herself should suffer so long as anybody was suffering, also could not conceive of herself as free. Her association with Christian mysticism is thus extremely complicated by her secular Jewish upbringing and personal relationship with suffering and self sacrifice. Weil’s personal flirtation with Christianity continued for the rest of her life, but she repeatedly refused baptism, pointing out the Christian refusal of salvation to atheists and Jews as central to her refusal. She described herself as somebody who loved Jesus but had no love for the church— and it seems entirely obvious why a European Jew on the brink of the Shoah, as deeply aware as she was of the history of European antisemitism and the numerous strands of Christianity at that very moment making their peace with the rise of fascism would be unwilling to reconcile herself to a tradition and community that was not willing to reconcile itself to her without insisting on her erasure through conversion. Weil could be tolerable to Christians only as an ex-Jew, and despite her lack of a religious Jewish upbringing or identity that was farther than she would go. She was willing to sacrifice her life, but not her sense of self or solidarity with her family and all the imperiled Jews of Europe.

Simone did in the end give up her life for her beliefs, though not in any of the heroic ways she had dreamed of. She took her parents to safety in America prior to the Nazi invasion of Germany, fully aware that they too would refuse to leave if doing so meant abandoning their daughter to death. But she did so for their security, wishing herself to be back in France, again heartbroken at the thought that she should have any comfort or safety which was denied to others. She returned to Britain and threw herself energetically into aiding the war effort, serving as a translator for British forces working to aid the French Resistance. Her poor health however kept her from being able to do as she wished and be a radio operative parachuted behind enemy lines. Distraught, she reduced her food intake further and further, convinced that many people were no doubt starving in France under the Nazi occupation. Her associates were convinced that she was overestimating the severity of rationing within France but Simone’s conviction that orders suffered more greatly than she and that she should do all she could to suffer with them was unshakeable. She died on the 23rd of Av 5703 from a heart attack brought upon by starvation.

[usafphantom2]

BRAZILIAN AIR FORCE

SPACE

SPECIALITIES

C-390 Unbeatable Combination

Military Home

Ukraine should receive its first F-16 from Denmark still in the first half of 2024

Ukrainian pilots are currently training in Danish airspace on Danish F-16 aircraft.

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 03/19/2024 - 16:00 in Military, War Zones

The Danish Armed Forces are preparing the donation of their first F-16 combat jets to Ukraine, which are expected to be delivered later this semester to the Ukrainian Air Force, no later than July.

This was announced during a meeting between the Minister of Defense, Troels Lund Poulsen, and his Belgian ministerial colleague, Ludivine Dedonder, in the Hunting Wing in Skrydstrup on March 18. The two ministers discussed cooperation with the F-16 and participated in training sessions with Ukrainian pilots.

— Troels Lund Poulsen (@troelslundp) March 18, 2024

The training of Ukrainian pilots and support personnel at Flyvestation Skrydstrup is taking place within the framework of the international air force coalition. Denmark leads the coalition together with the US and the Netherlands, which was created last year and has 16 member countries. Belgium, as a member of the coalition, contributes with F-16 aircraft and instructors to Denmark's training efforts.

“The training of Ukrainian personnel is progressing well and I am proud that Ukrainian pilots are training in Danish airspace on Danish F-16 aircraft. The progress of training is largely due to the invaluable contributions of countries such as Belgium, Norway and Canada "We have exemplary cooperation in the coalition. I spent the day in Skrydstrup participating in a very fruitful discussion about the cooperation of the F-16 with my Belgian ministerial colleague," said Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen.

The objective of the training is to ensure that the Ukrainian Air Force has the best possible conditions to operate, serve and maintain the F-16 fighters donated by Denmark and other allies. As part of the international effort to support Ukraine, the first F-16 training modules are now part of the EU military training mission to help Ukraine. This is crucial to coordinate the global European effort in Ukraine.

“The total contribution of the fighters coalition countries sends an important signal about the unity behind the support for Ukraine. The donation of aircraft and the training of pilots are decisive and highly valuable contributions to Ukraine in its struggle, which we must continue to fight in support both for the good of Ukraine and for the good of Europe," said Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen.

Tags: Military AviationF-16 Fighting FalconUkraine Air ForceDanish Royal Air Force - RDAFWar Zones - Russia/Ukraine

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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