I'm pretty good at choosing the best fruit from the supermarket. I picked up my knowledge from the most unlikely sources. Either my mother didn't tell me how to identify the various stages of ripeness in various produce, or more likely I wasn't paying attention. I learned to test cantaloupe for soundness by shaking the stem end next to my ear. If you hear sloshing, it's plenty ripe. Sniffing the stem end for fragrance works, too, but some fruit smells good before it's quite ready to eat. Of course, you look like a chimp checking for termites standing around shaking a big, unwieldy fruit next to your ear but it's an infallible method. An old lady in a supermarket showed me that one.

It was in a grocery store in Toulouse, France, that I learned how to test for ripeness in avocados. I was visiting Pascal Thomas and Christine Agnan, and decided to bring home some salad fixings for supper. Fearlessly, I chose the lettuce, the onions, the cucumbers, and the tomatos. But I wanted an avocado, too, and I really wasn't clear on how one knew the distinction between mostly ripe, ripe, and overripe. I was tentatively squeezing the tops of some avocados to test for firmness when one of the local matrons spoke to me.

"Wahwahwah wahwah wah wah?" she said in faultless French. I interpreted it to mean, "Stop squeezing those avocados, you inept tormentor of vegetables."

"Wah. Wah wah. Erm, wah. Wah wah wahwah wah," I replied courteously in what I think of as my horsie-duckie French. "I am squeezing the defenseless avocado because I don't know which end is up."

She laughed in a fairly friendly manner and held one up to demonstrate. "Wah wahwah wah wah. Wah wah wah, wahwah wah wahwah. Wah, wah?" I understood that I was squeezing the wrong end. The top was more vulnerable, and likelier to get soft first. If the base was springy, not hard or squishy, then it was ripe.

"Wah! Wahwah wah!" I said, delighted both with the information and the sense of communicating usefully in a foreign language. She smiled, and nodded, and told me a joke. Apparently, since the word for lawyer is the same as the word for avocado (avocat), the phrase to describe a bad or corrupt lawyer is "a brown avocado." We laughed in a sort of produce comraderie. I chose my avocados, and went home in triumph.

Thus, armed with knowledge gleaned from grocery stores around the world, and now funneled directly to me via the thoughtful people at Burpee, I am fully prepared to select or reject vegetables and fruit anywhere, any time. It's not a superpower, but it's darned close.

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