There are figs and there are figs

Look, here are some Sardinian figs (memories of Summer...) taken, just a few minutes before, off the fig tree branch:


and here are some other figs taken in London (still in late Summer) from a posh supermarket shelf:

You might notice they look rather “tighter”.

Let us check inside. Here you see the Sardinian ones:


And here are the London supermarket ones:


Can you see the difference? The fresh-from-the-tree ones are all over the place: they are so ripe they cannot hold their shape. Flavour, we can tell you, goes hand in hand with this type of disarray. Now imagine shipping those figs: if insect don’t have them before arrival, handling will finish them off. The figs will need to be plucked muuuuch too early.

Now for 'lecture' number two, a more seasonal one: observe these sharon fruits bought in a posh London supermarket:


and these from a supermarket in Italy:

above you see the "before" and "after" condition of the fruits :)


Now let us study them inside, first the London one

in case you wonder: no, nobody is holding the spoon up, it is the fruit which is that stiff!

next the one taken in the country of origin:


the latter gets much more "dishevelled" in appearance as soon as you cut through it. Look again, take a spoonful of the one bought in London:

and of the one bought in Italy:


Can you see how it oozes and dribbles? Now try and imagine how correspondigly sweet and juicy and marvellous it must be...

Moral: some food, including figs and sharon fruit, just does not travel well. It is pointless to try and buy material that will prove for sure desperately substandard, unripe, unreal, unrewarding (and moreover, at inflated prices). Our advice is: save a few pounds in the supermarket and use those savings to buy a flight ticket - if the figs do not travel to you, you should travel to the figs!

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