To All,
At H Mart on 4 Nov 2014 I secured a package of four off-brand pears. The sticker on the fruit called it a sand pear, while the label on the package and the sign on the display called it a ya pear. I will go with "ya pear." I conjecture that the
album released in 1970 by the Rolling Stones titled, "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out," was really a plea to grocers to display their ya pears more prominently. This pear's English name came from its looking like a ball of sand; its color is a pale yellow, almost white, speckled with innumerable tiny brown dots.
The pictures below show my ya pear, which is the same size and shape as a largish apple.
- On my cutting board.
- Cut in half so you can see the core.
- Cut into strips, which I ate (except for the strip containing the core, which I nibbled and then threw away).
Pears and apples present no new morphological challenges, so I ate this pear in a straightforward way with no perplexities or surprises.
The first thing you notice is that the ya pear is crunchy like an apple rather than soft like a pear. The taste is not as strong as a pear; while subtle, however, it is an interesting taste that is unlike any other taste I can think of. If I had to describe the ya pear experience in one word, I would choose "refreshing." If you are thinking of starting a toothpaste company, you should consider making ya pear your signature taste.
If I had been blindfolded, fed a ya pear without my knowing what it was, and asked if it was an apple or pear, my analysis would have proceeded as follows. It is crunchy like an apple, and its taste is sui generis. Therefore, it is an apple.
The verdict: At about a buck for a good-sized ya pear, the cost is roughly the same (maybe a little more) than that of an apple or standard pear, and the taste is appealing. Moreover, they are quick and easy to eat. Therefore, if you can find ya pears, they are worth a try.
Your party tip is to play fruit charades. This is like standard charades except that all of the target phrases are fruits, e.g., banana split, pineapple upside down cake, apple of his eye, pear-shaped tones, Kiwi shoe polish, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, banana nose, who gives a fig, "Clockwork Orange," the Big Apple, Prince of Orange, "Put the Lime in the Coconut," and peel the grape. Video your guests as they act out each fruit phrase. Later, use these videos to blackmail them.
This pear is imported from China. In 1991 China petitioned to be allowed to import the ya pear into Australia, and you can look at the 1998
report on the dangers posed by this fruit and the precautions that the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service required before this fruit was allowed into Australia. This gives us a look into the regulatory side of fruit, which usually we do not glimpse.
Rick
Appendix: What Did I Just Eat?
Read this appendix only if you obsess over knowing exactly what it is that you eat.
You might be wondering why, in contrast to my usual practice, I included no pictures of the ya pear from the Internet. The Internet is careless, and I always need to use care to make sure that the pictures I show are actually pictures of the advertised fruit. In this case, however, the pictures were all over the map, and I couldn't find any pictures that I could say with a fair degree of certainty were of the ya pear. Worse than this, when I went to the Internet to see what I could find out about this pear, I had a hard time finding out exactly what it was that I had just eaten. The term "sand pear" appears to be
applied to the Asian Pear (
Pyrus pyrifolia), on which I reported on May 16. My ya/sand pear looked somewhat like the Asian pear, but it was much lighter than the Asian pears I have seen, and the taste was not the same. The term "ya pear" is often
applied to what is usually called the Chinese white pear (
Pyrus bretschneideri). After digesting the ambiguities that assailed me, my conjecture is that what I ate was a hybrid of these two species, though it might be that I just had a cultivar of the Asian pear. In short, the sand or ya pear sold by H Mart is caught in a swirl of taxonomic uncertainty.
To try to reduce this uncertainty, I did a couple of comparisons. First, below are two pictures from the Internet of the Chinese white pear, which is called the ya pear; it is seen that it differs considerably from what I bought in that it is pear-shaped. The color seems to be variable.
Second, I bought an Asian Pear and did a side-by-side test. Below are pictures of wholes and halves of the Asian pear (on the left) and ya pear (on the right). In looks, they both have an apple shape rather than a pear shape, and they are roughly the same size. Both are spotted. The only visible exterior difference is that the Asian pear is somewhat darker. When cut in half, I could see no significant difference. I then alternated taking tastes. There were two clear differences. First, while both are crunchy, the ya pear is crunchier, much like an apple. Second, the Asian pear has a stronger pear flavor. Therefore, if we consider a continuum with an ideal pear at one end and an ideal apple at the other, both the Asian and ya pears are somewhere in the middle due to their shape and crunchiness, the flavor and crunchiness the Asian pear is more toward the pear end of the continuum and the ya pear is more toward the apple end. After this test, I still subscribed to the conjecture above that I ate a hybrid of the Chinese white pear and the Asian pear.
This is a good example of how using common names can cause ambiguity. The catch is that, despite what scientists often claim, scientific names can also be ambiguous since they can can be hard to apply, especially when there are hybrids, but I won't go into this now, having already exhausted your patience in my weeks-long discussion of citrus hybrids (see, e.g., the e-mail on citrus evolution, 17 Apr 2015). Moreover, scientific names can change over time in confusing ways,
[
Addendum: The above was, except for small revisions, written in Nov 2014; I didn't send it out because of my confusion over what I had eaten. The following was added in Jun 2015.] Two things have changed since I wrote the above. First, I have discovered PLU stickers (e-mail of 9 Dec 2014). I can look back at "Sticker Shock" (9 Dec 2014) and see that the PLU number for the ya pear that I bought last November is 4407 (see the picture below, which is a detail taken from "Sticker Shock"), for which the
PLU site, gives the following information:
- Commodity: Pears.
- Variety: Asian/Nashi
- Botanical: Pyrus pyrifolia.
The species name makes it look like I ate an Asian pear, but this is made ambiguous by the fact that "nashi" is apparently used to
refer to all hybrids descended from both the Asian and Siberian pears.
Second, on 4 Jun 2015 I went to H Mart, and they were again selling ya pears; the term "sand" did not appear anywhere on the package, the fruit, or the display. I didn't buy any, but they looked the same as the ya pears I bought last November. I did, however, note that this time the PLU sticker called it a "Ya Pear" instead of a "Sand Pear." Moreover, the PLU number was 4890, for which the
PLU site gives the following information.
- Commodity: Pears.
- Variety: Chinese Yali
- Botanical: Pyrus spp.
This re-confuses the issue. I looked at some sites describing the Chinese Yali pear and at pictures, one of which is below. The ya pears sold by H Mart don't look like yali pears pictured on the Internet (see picture below). Moreover, no specific species is given. This might mean that this is a hybrid. According to the New York Times, "ya" and "yali" are synonyms for the same fruit. (This is in an article on what is called the Chinese fragrant pear, which it compares favorably to the ya pear, which is described as "...durable but mediocre, with tough flesh and bland flavor.")
In summary, I can form conjectures about what I ate, but I really don't know. My final conjecture emerged when, as almost the last thing I did before sending this e-mail, I stumbled on the Wikipedia
article on
Pyrus x bretschneideri. (The "x" in this name signifies a hybrid. This is one of the schemes for naming hybrids that I declined to go into in the e-mail on citrus evolution of 17 Apr 2015). This article states that the yali pear is a hybrid of the Asian pear (which is known to me, 16 May 2014) and the Siberian pear (which is unknown to me). Moreover, this hybrid has been repeatedly re-crossed with the Asian pear to create a continuum of hybrids. H Mart is apparently selling one of these hybrids as the ya pear. The instability of H Mart's labeling reflect the confusion caused by this swarm of hybrids. In short, it appears that all this ambiguity in how to label a fruit stems mainly from its being hard to know how to refer to a fruit when there have been frequent hybridizations. This also explains why the pictures of these pears on the Internet show such variability. (Strange to say, the
genome of the dodgy species,
Pyrus bretschneideri, has been assembled.)
Don't let the haze of taxonomic uncertainty or the New York Times article obscure the fact that this fruit is good to eat. The problem is that in the future I might see a fruit and not know if it is the same fruit or not. Eating fruit becomes a taste in the dark.
