Why I prefer frozen fruit over candy and chips 🍓🍇

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The past few years, I’ve been buying a lot of frozen fruit when I go grocery shopping. I really like the bulk bags of frozen fruit you can get at a place like Walmart and some other groceries stores that have 2-4 pounds of frozen fruit in the bag. Not only is frozen fruit good on waffles and pancakes for breakfast, it makes an excellent snack, and is very economical compared to ice cream, chips, candy and cookies.

I saw an advertisement for some kind of bulk junk food supplier the other day on Facebook and had to cringe. Not only was it relatively to expensive to buy those big boxes of junk food, I just saw all the packaging and trash they entailed compared to a single lightweight plastic wrapper around the bulk frozen fruit. And I couldn’t imagine that they would last nearly as frozen fruit, which the only part that has ever gone to waste is the occasional blueberry or strawberry chip that I dropped on the floor and was stepped on or otherwise too disgusting to eat.

Fresh fruit might be slightly tastier then frozen, but it tends to be a lot more expensive and a lot more goes to waste due to spoilage. Frozen fruit never spoils. And fresh fruit tends to be a lot more packaged, meaning a lot more trash. Maybe if I lived out in the country and had hogs, chickens and acreage where I could feed or compost the waste and burn the packaging, I’d feel different, but I generally avoid fresh fruit unless I get it at a farm stand in the summer and it eat up in woods where frozen goods can’t be kept frozen.

White’s Island, Penna

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Jim Inch’s story began in Snyder County before his father Robert rented a house, then owned by the power company, on White Island.

In 1944, Robert swapped five mules—his farming power source—for a down payment on an International Harvester F-12. He planted 65 acres of feed corn, cultivated it three times, hired men to hand-husk it, then paid them with corn, leaving plenty for his corncrib.

Later that season, he learned that his down payment covered the tractor, and he even received a $200 rebate on it. The next year, he planted 36 more acres of corn on White’s Island.

“Dad said right then that he should have quit farming while he was ahead,” says Jim, 81. “You can be rich one day and poor the next in this business.”

Jim, though retired, still works seven days a week. He lives on another farm owned by Roy Adams & Son, Inc., which now has the unique farming rights to White’s and three other islands in the Susquehanna.

Tammy Wolfe, Roy Adams’ daughter and office manager in Sunbury, PA, says most don’t realize how hard farmers work, where food comes from or how technology-based today’s farming is. “We’re proud of that work and proud to be a part of it,” she says.

https://www.susquehannalife.com/2016/06/06/113206/tell-us-your-story-farming-susquehanna-river-islands