Your Fruit Tart’s Not-So-Secret Ingredient

by Allison Harris

Step 1: Pick a recipe. When you flip through your Great-Great Grammy’s lard-stained recipe cards, you will be pleased to remember that you are not bound by climate in the way she was. Gone are the days when the sticky peach cobblers could only drip down sunscreened toddlers in the summer and apple strudels could only warm grandpa’s chilled belly in the autumn breeze. The crowning achievement of the modern age is not the smart phone or artificial intelligence, but an all-American reliance on produce importation (“Imports Contribute to Year-Round Fresh Fruit Availability”). Settling on a recipe card, you smile: the best time to make a deliciously seasonal fruit tart, you think to yourself, is when you yearn for fresher days.

Step 2: Gather your ingredients. Lucky for you, the second crowning achievement of the modern age is the local Walmart, equipped with a world of ingredients that are fine enough for your winter palate. Entering the deserted produce section is akin to your grandparents’ migration down to Florida in the colder months. You circle the fruit displays, pinching and prodding at the colorful bodies you’ve never had the chance to miss. The cart becomes full as you pile high the plastic cartons and wispy bags of fruit. Strawberries, blueberries, kiwis, maybe an orange: you know the options are endless when the only indication that you’re buying something you normally couldn’t is a dollar or two tacked onto the price tag.

Step 3: Mise en place. Now that you’re home, it’s time to prepare. Wet and dry ingredients alike are a breeze—bright measuring cups and mixing bowls begin to litter your counter as you dollop out the thick whole milk and scoop clouds of all-purpose flour. You take a quick glance at your fruit and notice there must have been a buy-one-get-one-free special, as they drip with pesticides. For good measure, you run the strawberries and the blueberries under the faucet for a few seconds. That should do it, you smile knowingly. America’s dirtiest fruits smile back. How would you have known that strawberries and blueberries, so rank with traces of pesticides, have been deemed part of the “Dirty Dozen” (Environmental Working Group)? Willful ignorance is not listed as an ingredient in this recipe, but it would do nice sprinkled on top nonetheless. The risk of developing associated health conditions like asthma, bronchitis, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Parkinson’s disease, and prostate and lung cancers due to pesticide exposure do not outweigh the benefit of consuming a delicious fruit tart in just a few hours (Roberts).

Step 4: Briefly contemplate the morality of the industry you just bought into. What they don’t tell you is that on the back of these fruit containers, at the very end of the list of ingredients and branding and GMOs, is a tiny disclaimer warning you that the world will end soon and that it might be your fault. The minor difficulty with produce importation is the significant contribution it makes to greenhouse gas emissions, a substantial cause of climate change (“Causes of Climate Change”). In your home, you now harbor four of the top ten delectable culprits of fruit-related carbon emissions.

Step 5: Bake the tart anyway. You already bought the produce, so what’s the harm? You take the necessary steps to make your pastry cream and form your crust: whisk the wet ingredients in a saucepan, chill in the refrigerator. Combine butter and powdered sugar and other baking staples to form a thick dough, chill in the refrigerator. Roll out the chilled dough until it’s thin enough to line the tart pan, and then blind bake the crust in the oven. Once cooled, pour the pastry cream into the baked crust.

Step 6: Decorate. You decide to begin with the kiwis, as they would look nice forming a tight circle in the middle of the tart. You scoop out the juicy green flesh from its fuzzy exterior and slice into uniform rounds. As you carefully lay six or seven slices in the center, you will be pleased to know that this delicious fruit has the highest carbon footprint of the produce you gathered today. Most kiwis are grown in New Zealand and are transported around the world (including to your local Walmart) in refrigerated trucks and cargo containers, and this global transportation emits significant greenhouse gases through their consumption of fossil fuels (Mersereau). Convenient! Once the kiwis form a ring, you decide it might look nice to shingle a few thin slices of peeled orange where the sides of each slice of kiwi meet. You take a moment to meticulously peel the orange, making sure to remove those pesky strings of pith. You trim these wedges into thin semicircles, and as you do that you should know that these citrus fruits are no less guilty than the kiwi they will soon sit atop. While many are grown in the United States and thus do not require extensive transportation, they use significant amounts of excessive pesticides and hormone-disrupting fungicides (Mersereau). These synthetic chemicals are derived from fossil fuels, which release significant levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and increase the rate of climate change (“Pesticides & climate change”). Delicious! Now that the orange and kiwi create a beautiful contrast in the middle of the tart, you work your way to the outer edge. The vibrant strawberries will go next: you chop off the leafy tops and slice the remaining bodies into slivers, preserving the cross section. Before you shingle them around the circumference of the tart, you toss the trimmings into the plastic carton they came in. While convenient for you, this packaging is one of the main factors in strawberries’ carbon footprint. The manufacturing of plastic like this involves incredible amounts of carbon emissions (“Plastics and Climate Change”). Accompanying these plastic containers to the landfill are the discarded bits of strawberries, as most consumers will not compost them. The landfill is a festering ground for greenhouse gases like methane; rotten produce, sitting in plastic containers that will be here for the next few centuries, generates high levels of these gases through anaerobic decay (“Climate Change and Waste”). Yummy! The final touch are the blueberries, which fit perfectly into the gaps between the triangular tips of the strawberries. You pick up a handful of these tiny fruits and notice they still have a bit of residual moisture from their seconds-long bath in the kitchen sink. Water, or sticky pesticides? Blueberries are guilty of some of the most extreme rates of pesticide use; this agricultural practice, as well as specific mechanized farming methods expending notable energy levels, are significant factors in their high carbon footprint (Mersereau). Rinsing the blueberries may be relatively effective in washing off pesticides, but little can be done to wash off the impact their use has had on our environment (“How can I wash pesticides from fruit and veggies?”). Oh well!

Step 7: Consume. As the buttery crust and the smooth pastry cream and the sharp bits of fleshy fruit mingle on your fork, you return to Great-Great Grammy. You may not be bound by climate in the way she was, but she was not bound by climate change like you are. Your choices are somehow both insignificant and damning—and at that point, what difference do a few pieces of imported fruit make? The fork meets your lips, and the tart is fine, but there is a lingering aftertaste. It tastes like a shortcut. It tastes like the selfish prioritization of short-lived joy.

Step 8: Clean up what you can.