Nuts

Christmas is a time of ritual, and one of the many rituals observed in our family gatherings when I was a child were the nuts.  Although for the rest of the year the only nuts we ate were salted peanuts or the odd cashew, at Christmas a bowl of assorted nuts still in their shells appeared, along with a pack of sticky, sugary dates and mountains of dayglo satsumas.

One problem with the nuts was that the quantity of food supplied at this time was so copious that I, for one, found it hard to do justice to the nuts.  Another factor was that I disliked hazel nuts and walnuts. This left the Brazil nuts.  Now, I loved Brazil nuts; their texture and their taste were for me - by an obviously circular logic - the special taste of Christmas; and yet, wonderful as they were, Brazil nuts were cursed.

Every year I would eagerly take up the nutcrackers, those wonderfully medieval instruments of torture, and select a particularly fine specimen of a nut from Brazil.  Fine in this context meant large and with something approaching a rounded equilateral triangle for its cross-section.  Fine also meant that there was no ominous rattling when you shook that nut - a sure indication of something old and withered inside.  A little movement of the nut was, however, acceptable.

Positioning the nutcrackers with all my accumulated know-how, I would apply a judicious squeeze, carefully maintaining a kind of internal countervailing pressure within the hand so as not to overshoot.  For any fool can break open a Brazil nut by pure force; but the result is a soggy and sorry melange of nut and shell which was quite inedible.  Unfortunately, no matter how carefully I judged this squeeze, no matter how expertly I increased the pressure, it was precisely this nut and shell concoction which I produced.  Wild with desire for the perfection of the Brazil nut and its unique gustatory charms, I was frustrated in my repeated attempts until finally I was driven to the pitiful expedient of trying to gnaw some of the tantalising white flesh from the fragments of shell.  The result was always disappointing.  Hence my deeply ambivalent attitude to Christmas and its nuts.

Imagine my surprise and delight when in my local store I came across Whitworths nuts.  For just 35p, Whitworths would give me some 15 or so Brazils.  Not only were they removed from their shells, they were almost perfectly whole.  Hitherto it was a red-letter day to see one such object; to see and be able to buy fifteen of them, was unbelievable.  But here was a mystery: how did Whitworths do it?  Did they have a special variety of Brazil nuts which more or less fell out of their shells?  Or had they perhaps perfected some wonderful mechanism which shucked nuts effortlessly?  Both seemed unlikely.  Clearly human labour was involved.  But even allowing for extreme skill, we must suppose that many nuts are wasted. And if the end price is less than 2p a nut after crossing the Atlantic, imagine what the going rate for shelling those nuts must be in Brazil.  My perfect Whitworths nuts were perfect exploitation.  Perfect too because it was invisible to the innocent and ignorant eater.  Imagine then all the exploitation that is hidden in our other foods, all conveniently hard to pick out.  Just like a Brazil nut.

(17.7.88)

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