Hi Jean-Louis,

you wrote:
>I would be interested if you (or someone else) had a precise bio-
>chemical explanation that exceptions exist. The simplest explanation
>I see is that the quantity of protein you eat with durian cores is much
>lower than when you eat tuna (for instance), so it won't perturb your
>digestion. Same thing for pollen: very little pollen is naturally
>present in the comb, you eat only a few grains.

My two cents:
You are genetically adapted to these combinations, because in ancient
times humans (and their predecessors, apes) harvested e.g. a durian,
started eating it, were curious how these big cores would taste,=20
tried them, found them eatable, so ate them.

Your argument of a little amount of protein does not apply in my
oppinion. The cores of a wild durian (they were always wild in an-
cient times) are pretty large with little eatable flesh around them.
Wild quantities have only 18% eatable flesh compared to the weight
of the whole fruit!
For pollen you can easily pick parts of the comb, where the ratio
honey versus pollen is 50:50.
On the other hand: having eaten mangos, then durian, I ate just one
core of the durian. Unfortunately it mixed with the mangos and my
digestion was considerably troubled.
When I made a monomeal of durian and lots of cores it was no problem.

This is just the old argument of genetical adaption together with em-
pirical results and I guess it is not the "precise biochemical expla-
nation" you are looking for, right? Sorry, I can't offer more. :-)


Concerning honey prices:
You know, that normal bees are fed artificial honey during winter
time. This is something that can't be done for Orkos honey. Then,
in order not to decrease your bee population by starvation you can
only take a certain amount of honey from them, that leaves them
enough to come over the winter.
In Germany and other cold climates you could take nearly   n o
honey from the bees because they need virtually all of it for the
long winter.
So you are loosing lots of profit if you don't feed your bees with
artificial honey. That makes the prices of Orkos honey so high.

Concerning general Orkos prices again:

Kirt:
>And, like
>Jean-Louis, I couldn't understand many of their prices either. Honey
>was way high, and the imported stuff was often more than 250% the
>price of the sprayed fruit in Paris' chinatown. I'd like to see the
>numbers that justified prices like that. The costs for transport must
>be roughly comparable (for a chinatown importer vs. ORKOS) with ORKOS
>paying a premium for its smaller scale perhaps. But the southeast asian
>prices probably can't explain 250% difference on the exact same
>varieties. Time will tell, I suppose. When, and if, ORKOS has some
>competition, it will be interesting to see what happens.

Another factor that rises prices very very much: spoilage. Orkos'
foods aren't experiencing    a n y    conservating treatment. So they
are in the dilemma of harvesting the fruits as ripe as possible and
on the other hand bringing these ripe fruits to the customer before
spoilage ruins them. This race they loose frequently.

You know, that instinctos prefer fully ripe fruits. I always complain
at Orkos about green bananas and stone hard avocados. And I know of
other instinctos doing the same.

So we customers give them a hard pressure for ripe fruits and on
the other hand will complain if we receive perished goods.
That's perhaps not fair of us customers :-) but that's the way it is.

And if some bloody idiot on Bali has left the whole container with the
durians in the sun and they reached 42 C it has turned to rubbish for
Orkos - expensive rubbish. This happened several times in the years I
am buying from them.

Tell me a way to prevent that. Set up your own organization and become
a food supplier, like the german person I mentioned. You will without
any doubt see, how difficult it is.

Kirt:
>But ORKOS _has_ a pretty large customer base who is willing to pay
>their prices, so what does your story show?

My story shows, that the prices are reasonable. Just this. Sure, Orkos
didn't close down because they had enough customers. But this is pure
incident.

I agree with you, that mismanagement can be a reason for too high
prices at Orkos and I am sure this argument applies. But just the last
months Orkos states something that points exactly in this direction and
the prices for several foods were reduced drastically. What an
incident!

I don't expect Orkos to rise the wages, since the workers benefit quite
a lot from their work beneath the immediate paying aspect. This benefit
is difficult to express in marks and pfennigs and will always be subject
of discussions. Anyway, personally I don't see the Orkos' employees
to be exploited (employees - exploited - I'm near to word games here
and this in a language foreign to me - fantastic :-))

Kirt:
>But ORKOS _has_ a pretty large customer base who is willing to pay
>their prices, so what does your story show?

My story shows, that the prices are reasonable. Just this.

Best instinctively-priced wishes,

Stefan