Macro - Volume 1 - Punica Grantum

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volume I fruit



volume I fruit puniCa Grantum


FOrward

Hello and welcome to the first volume of Macro, the publication utilizing photography to take a closer look at the subject in both form and meaning. This volume, titled Fruit, focuses on fruit you will find in most American grocery stores. Each subject is carefully sliced into sections, allowing for a detailed look inside. The quality of the imagery, coupled with the enlarged size, provides us with an unusual yet stimulating perspective of the subjects form. You will notice throughout this volume that the fruit appears both fresh, and rotten. From beauty to ugly, nutritious to poisonous, this natural process of biodegradation reveals what happens when the produce is wasted. The idea of wasted produce compelled us to put together this volume, as it has become a major

problem to those living in the United States. Millions of pounds of produce are wasted each year, both by retailers and consumers. The reason varies from overproduction, to the physical features of produce, to simple negligence. The absurdity of this situation is amplified when we juxtapose food waste to the impoverished and hungry, the environment, and the economy. Research into this problem proves how epic this problem is. Dana Gunders lays down some legitimate figures in her NRDC paper aptly titled Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill. "Getting food to our tables eats up 10 percent of the total U.S. energy budget, uses 50 percent of U.S. land, and swallows 80


percent of freshwater consumed in the United States. Yet, 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. That is more than 20 pounds of food per person every month. Not only does this mean that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year, but also 25 percent of all freshwater and huge amounts of unnecessary chemicals, energy, and land. Moreover, almost all of that uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills where organic matter accounts for 16 percent of U.S. methane emissions. Nutrition is also lost in the mix—food saved by reducing losses by just 15 percent could feed more than 25 million Americans every year at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables."

A huge issue to say the least yet it is often slips by unnoticed. Maybe because wasted food at home is brushed off as an accident, or the immediate financial loss is not large, and the environmental impact isn’t that obvious, but the facts are out there, and we need to listen to them. We can make this problem a thing of the past, or at least begin to find solutions to solve it. The next time you're buying groceries, remember that what you waste is going to have a negative effect on you, those around you, the environment, and the economy.


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C a n t u m


Pomegranite Punica Grantum

The pomegranate, botanical name Punica granatum, is a fruit-bearing deciduous shrub or small tree in the family Lythraceae that grows between 5 and 8 m (16 and 26 ft) tall. In the Northern Hemisphere, the fruit is typically in season from September to February,and in the Southern Hemisphere from March to May. As intact arils or juice, pomegranates are used in cooking, baking, meal garnishes, juice blends, smoothies, and alcoholic beverages, such as cocktails and wine. The pomegranate originated in the region of modern-day Iran and has been cultivated since ancient times throughout the Mediterranean region and northern India. It was introduced into America (Spanish America) in the

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late 16th century and California by Spanish settlers in 1769. Today, it is widely cultivated throughout the Middle East and Caucasus region, north Africa and tropical Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the drier parts of southeast Asia, and parts of the Mediterranean Basin. It is also cultivated in parts of California and Arizona. In recent years, it has become more common in the commercial markets of Europe and the Western Hemisphere.


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Cultivation

Punica granatum is grown for its fruit crop, and as ornamental trees and shrubs in parks and gardens. Mature specimens can develop sculptural twisted-bark multiple trunks and a distinctive overall form. Pomegranates are drought-tolerant, and can be grown in dry areas with either a Mediterranean winter rainfall climate or in summer rainfall climates. In wetter areas, they can be prone to root decay from fungal diseases. They can be tolerant of moderate frost, down to about 12 °C (10 °F). Insect pests of the pomegranate can include the pomegranate butterfly Virachola isocrates and the leaf-footed bug Leptoglossus zonatus, and fruit flies and ants are attracted to unharvested ripe fruit. Pomegranate grows easily from seed, but is commonly propagated from 25– to 50-cm hardwood cuttings to avoid the genetic variation of seedlings. Air layering is also an option for propagation, but grafting fails.

Varieties

could well be a wild form with a distinct origin. It has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit. The only other species in the genus Punica is the Socotran pomegranate (P. protopunica), which is endemic to the island of Socotra. It differs in having pink (not red) flowers and smaller, less sweet fruit.

Cultivars

Punica granatum has more than 500 named cultivars, but evidently has considerable synonymy in which the same genotype is named differently across regions of the world. Several characteristics between pomegranate genotypes vary for identification, consumer preference, preferred use, and marketing, the most important of which are fruit size, exocarp color (ranging from yellow to purple, with pink and red most common), seed-coat color (ranging from white to red), hardness of seed, maturity, juice content and its acidity, sweetness, and astringency.

P. granatum var. nana is a dwarf variety of P. granatum popularly planted as an ornamental plant in gardens and larger containers, and used as a bonsai specimen tree. It

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Cultural history

Pomegranate is native to a region from Iran to northern India.Pomegranates have been cultivated throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Mediterranean region for several millennia, and also thrive in the drier climates of California and Arizona. Carbonized exocarp of the fruit has been identified in early Bronze Age levels of Jericho in the West Bank, as well as late Bronze Age levels of Hala Sultan Tekke on Cyprus and Tiryns. A large, dry pomegranate was found in the tomb of Djehuty, the butler of Queen Hatshepsut in Egypt; Mesopotamian cuneiform records mention pomegranates from the mid-third millennium BC onwards. It is also extensively grown in South China and in Southeast Asia, whether originally spread along the route of the Silk Road or brought by sea traders. Kandahar is famous in Afghanistan for its high-quality pomegranates. Although not native to Korea or Japan, the pomegranate is widely grown there and many cultivars have been developed. It is widely used for bonsai because of its flowers and for the unusual twisted bark the older specimens can

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attain. The term "balaustine" (Latin: balaustinus) is also used for a pomegranate-red color. Coat of arms of Granada The ancient city of Granada in Spain was renamed after the fruit during the Moorish period and today the province of Granada uses pomegranate as a charge in heraldry for its canting arms. Spanish colonists later introduced the fruit to the Caribbean and America (Spanish America), but in the English colonies, it was less at home: "Don't use the pomegranate inhospitably, a stranger that has come so far to pay his respects to thee," the English Quaker Peter Collinson wrote to the botanizing John Bartram in Philadelphia, 1762. "Plant it against the side of thy house, nail it close to the wall. In this manner it thrives wonderfully with us, and flowers beautifully, and bears fruit this hot year. I have twenty-four on one tree... Doctor Fothergill says, of all trees this is most salutiferous to mankind." The pomegranate had been introduced as an exotic to England the previous century, by John Tradescant the elder, but the disappointment that it did not set fruit there led to its repeated introduction


to the American colonies, even New England. It succeeded in the South: Bartram received a barrel of pomegranates and oranges from a correspondent in Charleston, South Carolina, 1764. John Bartram partook of "delitious" pomegranates with Noble Jones at Wormsloe Plantation, near Savannah, Georgia, in September 1765. Thomas Jefferson planted pomegranates at Monticello in 1771: he had them from George Wythe of Williamsburg.

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Imagery & Book Design Copyright Š William Pauley 2016 Forward by William Pauley with excerpt from Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill by Dana Gunders for NRDC, 2012. Main text originates from the Wikipedia article Pomegranate, found at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pomegranate&oldid=712222988, which is protected under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Details of this license can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License




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