A little while back, my mom and I went to T&T Supermarket — a Taiwanese-style supermarket with all sorts of Asian specialties — and we happened to find ourselves in the produce section. There, they were selling what the sign called “Taiwan mango”, but what I saw were mangoes that looked like they went through the dryer in reverse. Like, seriously, these mangoes looks like they were on steroids. When I picked up the plump mango, it definitely had some weight and girth to it. They were priced at $0.99 a pound, so we decided to buy one just to try.

We got to the cash register and the clerk put the fruity behemoth on the scale, telling us that this single piece of fruit was a whopping two pounds. One mango, two dollars. It’s not quite as expensive as Korea — if The Daily Kimchi is to be believed — but that’s pretty damn pricey by Vancouver standards. In any case, the mango was still a little raw, so we waited a couple of days as it ripened. Eventually, it looked like it was ready to be consumed, so we cut it up. (Sorry, I didn’t take any innard pics, but the inside looked pretty much like a normal mango.)

Well, the net experience was that this mango was tasteless, had a strange (almost grainy) texture to it, and all in all, was a big waste of two bucks. Word to the wise: Buy small or normal-sized fruit. Buy organic fruit. ‘Cause it seems that the uglier it looks, the sweeter it is.

Yeah, don’t buy this… even if it’s twice as big as a can of Coke.

One Big Mango from Taiwan