Mothers have spent the week cursing the Duchess of Sussex for her beautifully arranged fruit plate, the showpiece of her new Netflix series, With Love, Meghan. The substance of the criticism did seem well founded. On a rustic wooden board, Meghan had fashioned a rainbow from the following: what looked like three punnets of strawberries, two of raspberries; blueberries, three kiwis and a pineapple; several satsumas, nectarines, a banana and an unspecified number of dried rose petals.
Meghan’s aim was to “create wonder in every moment”, but who is this rainbow for? Are you trying to kid four-year-olds that they’re literally eating a rainbow (in which case, surely some clouds made of squirty cream would have been in order?) Or are you trying to remind later millennials of Pinterest circa 2011? It’d be good to know, before we drop £31.40 on this preposterous amount of fruit.
A note on the cost: I am not the only fearless reporter to try to recreate this, and we’ve all come out with slightly different price tags, which don’t seem to be based on where we shop. Nobody brought it in at less than £30. I couldn’t find rose petals and instead bought “fruitfetti” from Holland & Barrett. That added nothing but more fruit, desiccated, as if for an astronaut on a diet, but seemed to remain true to the spirit of the exercise, which was silliness, whimsy.
OK, £30 is a lot: it’s probably about as much as I would spend on fruit in a year, but I’ve never been a huge fan. As for execution, it won’t kill you, time-wise, particularly if your nectarines are ripe, which mine weren’t, and you had to get your pineapple pre-cut, which I did.
Half the plate is no effort at all. It’s impossible to mess this up: it will always look like a rainbow, and I can’t see it ever taking more than 20 minutes if you know your way around a kiwi. A family of two adults and two late teens can clear it in roughly the same amount of time, but only if they really like fruit.
The question is, who’s trolling whom? Has Meghan noted the objections to her – that she’s fancy, that she’s woo-hoo, that she’s earnest, that she’s out-of-touch, yada yada – and decided to throw it back in our faces, in fruit form?
I quite like that version of Meghan – she’s like a situationist Marie Antoinette. This alternative reading is that she’s just a regular Marie Antoinette, in which case next time she should try it with cake. British mothers never curse cake.
