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Dear friends who make their living as horticulturists and/or botanists, your bakerina needs you tonight.  I am perturbed and suspicious, and I'd really like to know if my bad attitude is justified, or if it is merely the product of an ill-informed mind.  Thanking you in advance for your input.

It is my own fault, this attitude of mine.  Wiser people have warned me not to do it, but Wednesday night found me, as most Wednesday nights do, in the football-field-sized mishegoss that is The Supermarket That Starts With W and Rhymes With Volefoods.  There is a new Rhymes-With-Volefoods across the street from my farmer's market, and the New York-based food press has made a lot of noise about whether the farmer's market can survive the competition from RWVfoods, but those of us in the know, namely those of us who have been shopping the farmer's market for years and have built up relationships with the farmers, know that RWVfoods is no competition, not at all.  So what was I doing at the uptown, fancy-mall-based outpost of RWVfoods?  Truth be told, I find myself there every Wednesday night.  It is around the corner from Mental Health Professional's office, just up the street from my subway line, and it sells a few items of decently prepared food, which I'll bring home for dinner.  Normally I just grab my chicken rice soup or my crab spring rolls or my turkey sandwich, maybe a pint of frozen yogurt for me and Lloyd, and beat it out of there.  Last night, though, I found myself wandering amidst the produce section, for no reason I could ascertain other than willful perversity.  It was in this willfully perverse state that I found myself staring at a little mountain of unripe passion fruit.

If you are not familiar with the passion fruit, here is a bit of passion fruit trivia, created especially for PTMYB.  The passion fruit looks like this. The leathery purple (or sometimes yellow) skin is inedible.  What you want are the pulp and seeds; they look slimy and scary, but they taste sublime, intensely tart and flowery.  As they ripen, that smooth skin wrinkles, giving the fruit the appearance of a giant raisin, or a round, egg-sized chipotle pepper.  They are a commercial crop in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Brazil and South Africa.  In the U.S., they are staggeringly expensive.  I usually find them, imported from New Zealand, at Grand Central Market for US$1.75 each.  This is for roughly a tablespoon of fruit pulp.  There is nothing more dispiriting than to open up a cookbook, say, Paramount Desserts by the awe-inspiring Australian chef Christine Mansfield, find a recipe for a lovely passion fruit-flavored dessert, and to read in the ingredient list, "25 passion fruits, juiced, seeds strained out (save a few for garnish)."  Not at $1.75 a pop, I won't.  If I travel across town to Chelsea Market, where I used to shape bread at Amy's Bread, I can buy a liter of frozen Perfect Puree passion fruit juice at the Italian food shop.  It is a fine substitute, but it is not always available.  As a result, I find myself contemplating the passionfruit with a mixture of longing and frustration.  I dream of pavlovas, crunchy meringue, whipped cream filling, passion fruit pulp strewn with luscious abandon across the top.  I want to make this right now.

Rhymes-With-Volefoods sells New Zealand passion fruit for $1.98 each.

Except that last night...last night they had a big basket of Florida passion fruit, and a sign reading "Passion Fruit:  $2.98/pound."  $2.98/pound sounds awfully cheap for a fruit that sells six to the pound.  I check the sign again; it's not $2.98/unit, is it?  No, the bag of key limes sells for $2.98/unit; the passion fruit are clearly marked $2.98/pound.  It's too good to be true, but just in case it isn't, I drop six into a bag and take it to the register.

As the nice young cashier rings up my order, I ask her to check on the price of the passion fruit.  She punches a few keys as I say, "they're marked as $2.98/pound."  "No," she replies, "they're priced per unit."  "How much are they per unit?", I ask.  "They're $1.98 each," she answers.  "Do you still want them?"  I do not, thank you, and she's very nice about it, even as I ever so gently remind her that the display in produce does indeed bear a sign that reads $2.98/pound.

Here is where I must call on the expertise of my more horticulturally-literate dear friends.  Is there anything particularly fussy about the cultivation of passion fruit, specifically the kind of fussiness that would force RWVfoods to charge the same amount of money for fruit trucked in from Florida as for that flown in from New Zealand?  I promise I'm not being a wisenheimer.  I really want to know.  If this is necessary, if there's no getting around it, I'll just suck it up and pay for my pleasure.  But if it's not, then it's time for me to start looking for a nice stateside passion fruit farmer who is willing to sell in bulk.

A postscript:  The University of Florida IFAS Extension has a neat and informative fact sheet on the passion fruit, but unfortunately the authors lost me at this line: "Both purple and yellow passion fruits begin to lose moisture as soon as they fall and quickly become quite wrinkled if held under hot, dry conditions. Juice in these fruits is wholesome, but they are unsightly and thus unmarketable."  I will refrain from pointing out that this is the reason that beautiful-looking supermarket produce often tastes of nothing.  I won't say another word.  Yet.