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Pumpkins and figs

One of my favourite times of year is when we start making hearty soups again. But I especially like this time because the pumpkins have arrived and I have never lived in a place that has such a variety of wonderful pumpkins. Last year I made a pumpkin display in my fireplace (which we never use incidentally). Many of the pumpkins lasted almost a whole year before they dried out which tells you something about how our forebears dealt with winter shortages.

And my favourite fruit is around. The fig. Especially when it gets slightly overripe. When we visited Greece, I couldn't believe how many figs were just lying around on pavements having fallen off trees lining the streets. A bit like bananas in Fiji - at the height of the season you can't even give them away to the poorest people. Imagine how much life-saving fruit just goes to waste every year all round the world. We might be incredibly sophisticated when it comes to technology but why haven't we learned how to share the abundance of Nature yet?

Now if out-of-work Greeks harvested all the figs in Greece that would otherwise go to waste and had a place to take them where they could get something in exchange even if not money, and the figs could be turned into fig paste and sent to places where people are starving in Africa, wouldn't that be a perfect world. And so on ... (I am not picing on Greece).

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