When I was a kid in my rural Canadian town, many things taken for granted today were just not in grocery stores. Primarily I don't recall seeing cantaloupes ev

When I was a kid in my rural Canadian town, many things taken for granted today were just not in grocery stores. Primarily I don't recall seeing cantaloupes ever, and I would be surprised if avocados were there. Heck I recall there only being one or two types of onion, typically, and lots of things were only available in season. I imagine stores in the "big city" might have had some of these things, or maybe only specialty stores? Yet even today if I buy apples "out of season", they taste dry and tasteless. Makes sense considering how they arrived from South America or whatever. As a test I've bought apples from the local farmer at perfect ripeness, stored them in a cold room, and they taste far better than apples, out of season, in the grocery store. So not stocking apples from South America historically made sense, especially in a rural area, where every family I knew bought a bushel or two of apples in season, and put them in a cold room. It's so weird. People are quite concerned about environmental concerns, then don't buy and store things when in season. Then they buy those same things from 1/2 the planet away, and wonder why all the shipping happens. And on top of all this, a bushel of apples is far cheaper at the farmer, than buying them piecemeal at the grocery store. Ah well. Different times.