Last week I needed to stow some food in a kitchen cabinet and to find a space I removed a can with fruit that had been there for ages. Then I left the can standing around for a few days and decided that it did not make for a nice kitchen adournment and had to go, but what about its contents?
The can with an Asian fruit called "longan" was a present by my best friend and his family when they took us on a rainy but very pleasurable day-trip to Amsterdam in August 2002 where we had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. They stocked up on Vietnamese food and invited us to taste this fruit. We thanked them and put away the can, first at our home in Berlin, Germany, and then here in the Catalan countryside. An inscription on the can said that its contents was "best before February 2004". Nearly six years later, I found myself with the dilemma of what to do with it now.
I opened the can, as the waste had to be separated into its metallic and organic parts. The fruit looked still fine, emitted no suspicious smells, so I tasted it. It was still fine. A taste difficult to describe, sweet. The texture is like grape.
I find it a little embarassing that it took me so long to get back to my friend's present - and I am glad that the fruit endured all that time in its can, so that I still had the chance to taste it. Better late than never.
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