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To my knowledge the last time someone dished out a ridiculous amount of money for fruit, it was for a banana taped to a wall in a gallery.

The banana was an ‘installation’ by famous Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan at the Art Basel Miami Beach exhibition, and while I’m still convinced that he was calling everyone’s bluff, he did manage to score a cool R1,7 million out of the con.

An auction at Tokyo’s central wholesale Ota Market in Japan this week also saw fruit flying off the block at a hefty price but in this case, for vastly different reasons.

A single 20-kilogram crate of 100 Japanese mandarins (also called mikan) sold for a staggering one million yen, or roughly $9 600, says CNN.

That’s upwards of R151 000, or around R1 500 an orange.

I’m not sure if you’d eat that or preserve it.

So, why?

Nishiuwa, where the oranges come from, is one of Ehime’s mikan-producing regions. The highest-priced Nishiuwa mandarins are from one of the region’s leading brands Hinomaru.

“Hinomaru mikan are produced in a limited area on the coast of Yawatahama city in Ehime prefecture,” Shin Asai, from JA Nishiuwa’s sales department, tells CNN.

Image: JA Nishiuwa

“It’s a mikan that is grown with so-called three suns — the actual sun, the reflected light from the sea and the reflected light from the stone walls of the terraced fields.”

Asai adds that this year’s crop has been of particularly high quality.

The auctioned mandarin oranges fetched a “celebratory price” which marked the beginning of Japan’s mikan season.

Here’s a representative of the Nishiuwa agricultural association:

“Since the quality of the fruit of each year is evaluated at the first auction, it will greatly affect the subsequent sales,” Asai says.

“First auction is very important for the fruit industry.”

The important thing to remember is that fruit plays a very different role in Japan than it does elsewhere.

“Fruits are treated differently in Asian culture and in Japanese society especially,” Soyeon Shim, dean of the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNN in 2019.

“Fruit purchase and consumption are tied to social and cultural practices.”

Image: JA Nishiuwa

“It is not only an important part of their diet, but, perhaps more importantly, fruit is considered a luxury item and plays an important and elaborate ritual part in Japan’s extensive gift-giving practices.”

Mandarins are one of the most popular fruits in Japan, so on some level, this makes sense?

Whoever gets one of those R1 500 mandarins as a gift should eat it very very slowly.

[source:cnn]