Almonds and cashews

I love nuts, all sorts of nuts. I associate them with Christmas when we would have bowls of nits in their shells which as our hands got bigger we could mange to crack with the nutcrackers; in the bottom of our Christmas stocking, along with a tangerine and a couple of bright new pennies, would be a couple of nuts – and to this day, when father Christmas comes to our house we have nuts as well as coins and tangerines in our stockings!

My dad was very fond of salted peanuts, and when he met his friend Pete and brother-in-law Ken for a drink on a Friday or Saturday night at the Ancient Shepherds, a pub in Fen Ditton near Cambridge, they always had salty nuts. Ken had a newsagent’s shop and he used to bring a bag of nuts with him, until the landlady told him not to and to buy her nuts instead!

We did not have all the different sorts of nuts we have now, but we had Brazils (which didn’t come down the Amazon until January, my grandpa who had been there told us) almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts and cob nuts. I didn’t come across pistachios, pecans or cashews until much later in my life. However, I love all these nuts, raw, as butters, cooked, roasted, in things,and even pickled as in pickled walnuts.

Now within two weeks I have read about the price of almonds and cashews, the true price; apparently it takes 1 gallon of water to produce 1 almond – not too bad in dampish Britain, but in places like the west coast of the USA where there are acres and acres of almond trees grown to make almond products such as almond milk, being irrigated with water from deep underground and depleting resources, it is a costly crop. Today I have read about cashews; the process needed to extract the ‘nut’ involves the removal of its outer layer and the nuts produce a caustic liquid that burns the skin. In a safe production environment the workers are protected, but where labour is cheap and the law is lax people are physically suffering from the chemicals involved.

I will now take great care when I buy these nuts.

Almonds:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11547127/Almonds-blamed-in-California-drought.html

The problem with cashew nut production isn’t new; here is an article from eighteen months ago:

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/nov/02/cashew-nut-workers-pay-conditions-profits