INTRODUCTION:

       The Gatherers and the Hunted

      Pick a bunch of green grapes, wash it, and put one in your mouth. Feel the grape with your tongue, observe how cold and refreshing it is: the crisp flesh, and the jellylike interior with its mild, sweet flavour.

      Eating grapes can feel like an old pleasure, untouched by change. The ancient Greeks and Romans loved to eat grapes, as well as to drink them in the form of wine. The Odyssey speaks of ‘a ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes’. As you pull the next delicious grape from its stalk, you could easily be plucking it from a Dutch still life of the seventeenth century, where grapes are tumbled on a metal platter with oysters and half-peeled lemons.

      But look closer at this bunch of green grapes, cold from the fridge, and you see that they are not unchanged after all. Like so many other foods, grapes have become a piece of engineering designed to please modern eaters. First of all, there are almost certainly no grape seeds for you to either chew or spit out (unless you are in certain places such as Spain or China, where seeded grapes are still part of the culture). Strains of seedless grapes have been cultivated for centuries, but it is only in the past two decades that seedless has become the norm, to spare us the dreadful inconvenience of pips.

      Here’s another strange new thing about grapes: the mainstream ones in the supermarket such as Thompson Seedless and Crimson Flame are always sweet. Not bitter, not acidic, not foxy like a Concord grape, not excitingly aromatic like one of the Muscat varieties of Italy, but just plain sweet, like sugar. On biting into a grape, the ancients did not know if it would be ripe or sour. The same was true, in my experience, as late as the 1990s. It was like grape roulette: a truly sweet one was rare and therefore special.