I often wonder whether the unfathomably superior tastes I attribute to home-grown veg come from my heart rather than my taste buds, but Hicks assures me that it'll be because the food is picked at peak ripeness and eaten immediately.
"Within five to ten years, we'll be able to do a full analysis of each berry's ripeness and skin thickness," says Mr Borie, the estate's owner.
Supermarkets, for instance, like uniformity so if they want, say, apples of a certain size and in a particular state of ripeness, a farmer could use the model to identify exactly where such apples are growing.The take-up of mechanisation will depend on where the produce is going and how carefully machines can pick it.
The red-green system of M and L cones enabled primates to distinguish particular elements in their environment for example, the ripeness of fruit in the tropical woodlands that the early primates inhabited.
The yield of milled rice is dependent on the size and shape of the grain, the degree of ripeness, and the extent of exposure to the sun.
Autumn is seen not as a time of decay but as a season of complete ripeness and fulfillment, a pause in time when everything has reached fruition, and the question of transience is hardly raised.
Similarly, the doctrine of ripeness prevents plaintiffs from seeking judicial relief while a threatened harm is merely conjectural, and the doctrine of mootness prevents judges from deciding cases after a dispute has concluded and legal resolution will have no practical effect.
It proves more controversial than expected, however, thanks to the Whole Foods Brie de Meaux I'd chosen, the ripeness of which caused some to emit goldfish-like gasps, while others, puffed up with cheese machismo, scarfed theirs down – only later admitting privately that they had lost use of their tongue.
The fragrance of the sliced-to-order prosciutto, ripeness of the peaches and freshness of the roughly torn ball of soft, lactic, curdy, creamy cheese is proof that good shopping is 90 per cent of good cooking.
I took a stroll up to the site – currently only a large clearing in the forest – past cacao trees bearing pendulous, green, red, yellow and purple pods, depending on their variety and ripeness.
This Autumn is truly living up to Keat's observation that the season loads and blesses "with fruit the vines that around the thatch-eves run/To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees/And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core".(To Autumn).
