EVEN though I was early, the queue for the removal was long and winding, and, as neither of us seemed to want to spend the time staring into the screens of our phones, a conversation started up.
I’d never met the man before.
Like me, he was a lone mourner, come to pay his respects to the bereaved family.
In the course of our conversation I learned that he was a farmer, or - given how agriculture in this country is going and the struggle most farmers are having to make a living from the land - he was working part-time as a farmer. The rest of the time, he said, he worked in construction. He was lean and hardy-looking, with a clipped way of speaking; a man who didn’t waste his words but enjoyed a decent conversation at the same time.
As the queue inched forward, we wandered over the weather, politics and the growth of the far-right, carnage on the roads and then, for some reason, we landed on the topic of cancer – the sad reason for this function we were attending – and from there to public health and the food we’re eating.
He hadn’t a very high opinion of either, as it turned out.
Not of people’s general state of health – most live dangerously sedentary lives, he said, and the level of obesity is frightening.
Not of the food so many are eating – highly processed, deeply unhealthy - or of the water we’re drinking.
“What?” I said, taken aback.
He’d had a water filter installed years ago, he said.
Every year the company came out and serviced it, and every year when he saw the state of the filter, he said, he was very glad he had installed it.
I gulped.
“What made you do that?” I asked.
When he started noticing that his dogs no longer drank the tap-water he put in their bowls, he said.
“They’d only drink water from the puddles.”
I forgot to ask him where his water came from – a private or community well, a public water main - but I made an immediate mental note to investigate how to get a filter installed at home. Pronto.
I was silent for a moment, suddenly recalling the media reports about concerns about water quality. Discoloured water. Chemicals in the water. People complaining about feeling ill after consuming drinking water.
Then, remembering something else, I told him my blueberry story. I like blueberries. I have them for breakfast. I take a handful of them out of the fridge now and again during the day as a boost.
Blueberries, as you may know, are often referred to as a ‘superfood’. They are said to have the highest antioxidant levels of the common fruits and vegetables we eat, and can contribute to improved heart and digestive health and even improve memory on top of other things.
I had also been advised to eat them to stave off macular degeneration, which is an eye disease that can severely affect your central vision.
So, every week, I would buy a fairly large quantity of blueberries as part of the grocery shopping. I bought them in the same place every week. And before eating them, I’d give them a quick rinse under the tap.
One week, for some reason, I happened to eat very few blueberries. When I checked the fridge to see what I needed to get in that week’s grocery shopping I noticed most of them were left. I decided I’d put those old ones – not very old, mind you and they were still plump and glossy – out on the bird table and buy a new lot.
That evening, I noticed that the blueberries hadn’t been eaten by the usually voracious wild birds living in and around my garden. In fact, they didn’t seem to have touched the lovely glossy berries at all.
The following day, the blueberries were still there on the bird table, and the day after that. In the end I scooped them up into my hands and threw them into the ditch.
I went off blueberries for a while. The next time I bought them, I got a different brand in a different shop. And before I even touched them, I put a heap of them out on the bird table. To my relief, those new berries were quickly eaten.
The farmer nodded.
“Animals and birds know a lot more than we do,” he said.
Then he told me his apple story.
He liked apples. And he liked a very particular kind of apple, which his wife always got for him when she went shopping and unpacked into a bowl on the kitchen table.
For some reason he said, he started to get the feeling that the apples he didn’t get around to eating were lasting a bit too long. They remained a bit too brightly coloured, a bit too polished, and way too plumply rounded and fresh-looking for his comfort, he said.
I had a few apple trees myself, I said, and I find that once they’re picked, if you don’t put them in the fridge – and there usually isn’t room to store them there - they do start to look wizened and shrunk after a while. Over the years, I’d learned that it really was best to peel them, chop them and use them, or else freeze apple slices in zip-lock bags as soon as possible after picking.
Well, those apples his wife had been buying didn’t seem to go off at all, he said, so he eventually asked her to get different apples somewhere else. And she did. And those ones don’t tend to last a suspiciously long time if he doesn’t get around to eating them, he said.
I had store-bought eating apples in a bowl at home, the very same kind of apples. I bought them every week with the grocery shopping.
After I got home from the funeral mass, I decided to leave them in the bowl untouched, and, sure enough, after three weeks – three weeks - they still looked fresh as ever.
I halved a couple of them and stuck them on the branches of a tree near the bird table in my garden. The birds didn’t touch them.
Honestly, where do you go from there?
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