To Take What We Love Inside: On Stone Fruit and Desire
This article was originally published in Le Petit 3’s July 2025 issue. They kindly gave permission for its publication here. The recipe in the original piece has been omitted.
Biting into a luxuriously juicy piece of stone fruit betrays one of life’s greatest paradoxes: the most extraordinary moments are found in life’s most humble experiences. Is there anything that captures the opulent generosity of the earth and our human capacity for pleasure quite like eating fruit, fresh from the tree, still warm from the sun?
It is as though a still life has been animated when we pluck a ripe plum from the bowl and devour it, just as a wooden bowl of apricots on the kitchen counter seems poised, patiently waiting for the painter to capture its modest beauty. Perhaps it is the fact we recognize the same color in the rosy apricot as we do in the setting sun, or the elegant curvature of a peach, or the memory of life growing simpler in summertime as the earth offers up these gifts, their abundance stirring a feeling of ease, but it is no doubt that we find in fruit something of art.
In his poem, “From Blossoms,” a eulogy about the bliss of purchasing and consuming peaches from a roadside stand, Li-Young Lee captures the joy wrapped up in this act, and how consumption is so much more than flesh eating flesh:
“O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.”
For Lee, and what he urges his readers to understand, is that eating fruit is not merely an act of sustenance, but a taking into ourselves of every miracle that went into the making of it, from sun to shade to time.
This rapture is mirrored in Diane Ackerman’s “Consolation of an Apricot,” where she captures the fruit’s dual nature, both its being-of-the-earth and its sacredness:
“Somewhere between a peach and a prayer
they taste of well water
and butterscotch and dried apples
and desert simooms and lust.”
Lust — yes. Eating a dripping piece of stone fruit is a greedy, gluttonous thing.
Emblematic of desire, fruit throughout history has symbolized dangerous appetites, the flesh, and devious passion. A fruit tree’s bejeweled boughs, dipping low to the ground under the weight of its bounty, signifies fecundity and the earth’s exuberant generosity. Even its abundance seems suspicious. In a culture that values restraint and moderation and shames indulgence, the tree’s sheer vigor in producing more and more, until its own limbs are threatened under the weight of its bounty, elicits something like incredulity. Indeed, cities often plant male trees because their fruit-bearing female counterparts are considered too messy, their prolificacy turning city sidewalks into sticky rotting walkways.
From Eve and the apple to Persephone and the pomegranate, fruit has long been tied to female hunger and transformation. It is a symbol of urgency, too: pleasure that cannot wait. Stonefruit exists in a state of perfect ripeness for only a few days, whereas onions can be stored in the cellar, and sweet potatoes sit unhurried on the kitchen counter. The summer heat only hastens their ripeness, transmuting fiber to sugar, and sugar to alcohol, which eats away at the fruit's firmness. With this softening comes surrender: once it can no longer cling to the tree that bore it, the fruit releases, bruising itself on the ground below, waiting to rot, unless taken up by eager hands and eaten hastily, or made into a pie, preserves, or jam.
Why is it that something as small as a peach or an apricot moves us so deeply?
Maybe it is the fruit’s imperative to be eaten which heightens our awareness of time as well as our duty to steward the earth and its excess. Perhaps it is an unconscious understanding that our mortality engenders such moments of shining bliss like tasting the sweet freshness of a cold plum. Or, perhaps it is less metaphysical than all that. Maybe it’s just our animal bodies rejoicing in sweetness and sugar.
Closing out his ode to peaches, Li-Young Lee writes with ardent devotion about this experience that connects us to our own mortality and life:
“There are days we live
as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”
Lee’s words linger in the mind. Their ebullience combined with their repetition impress upon us that sensuous delight and impermanence are inseparable. One way to honor the season’s fleeting harvest is through preservation. A shrub is a drinking vinegar that originated somewhere in Europe or Persia and became popular in colonial America as a way to preserve fruit, with both the sugar and vinegar acting as guard against the proliferation of bacteria. It has a similar acidity, tang, and sweetness as kombucha. Apricots are used here, but any stonefruit will work. Add herbs or other botanicals as you feel called, such as saffron, lavender, thyme, tarragon, or ginger.
