Fruit and vegetables now defy the seasons – with one exception: the lychee

When I was a kid, my mother was still in the habit of shopping daily. We had a fridge, but it hadn’t really changed our eating habits yet. Most shops featured a counter, behind which the “assistant” would stand and fetch what you wanted.

Fruit and vegetables were different. In the UK, these came from a specialised shop called the greengrocer’s, which was set up rather more like a Hong Kong wet market. The fruit and veg were out on shelves or in baskets so you could inspect and fondle the goods.

There was a big open space in the middle of the shop where the greengrocer performed, juggling fruit, chaffering with the customers (most of whom he knew by name) and weighing purchases on a large weighing machine.

There was, I noticed, a lot of variation in what was available. We were at the mercy of the climate. You ate salad in the summer because that was when lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes were “in season.”

You had Brussels sprouts with your Christmas turkey because sprouts were the only green vegetable immune to frost. Strawberries were a treat at Wimbledon because they had been unobtainable for nine months before.

Well, we have changed all that. Wandering my local supermarket, I find that most of the fruits and vegetables are reassuringly consistent. They may come from different places at different times of the year, but they are always there.

This is partly because food now frequently flies. So what is out of season in the northern hemisphere will be just coming into fruition in the southern one. Also, a lot of food production is now conducted in entirely artificial environments. Confused plants can be persuaded that it is fruit time regardless of the calendar.

This is all well and good, and no doubt makes it easier to follow a healthy diet. But there is one exception. We have just passed, you may not have noticed, the end of the lychee season.

I was a fan of the lychee long before coming to Hong Kong. This is because Chinese restaurants in the UK, at least outside the big cities, sold a rather specialised foreigner-friendly version of Chinese food, and this did not include desserts.

If you really wanted a dessert, there were only two possibilities: ice cream or tinned lychees. This was thoroughly misleading. When I came to Hong Kong, I found whole restaurants devoted to Chinese sweet dishes, offering an intriguing range of soups, dumplings, fruits and variations on rice. There were no tinned lychees or, for that matter, ice cream.

In due course, I was introduced to the real fresh lychee. In those days, the Xinhua news agency office in Hong Kong was routinely described as China’s de facto embassy in the British colony, but they did perform some press relations stuff. And so I was invited on a day trip to see the lychee harvest in Shenzhen, which in those days still had trees and farms.

I am not sure how the industrial-scale picking is done, but we were all issued with bags and urged to help ourselves. The lychee tree is a conveniently low tree.

But it seems somehow to have eluded the trend towards fruit and vegetable globalisation. You can get lychees when they are in season in Guangdong. Outside that time, you can’t. This is surprising.

When kiwis were a New Zealand speciality, they were seasonal. But the fruit, also known as the Chinese gooseberry, was long ago transplanted and copied. So now they come from a variety of places, and you can get them all year round. Why has this not happened to the lychee?

Let me offer a free suggestion to any New Zealand farmer who thinks the kiwi business is getting a bit crowded these days. Buy, borrow or steal a lychee tree. In the summer – that is your summer, not ours – you will have the world to yourself.