Chat-bout.net - 'Taste an Buy' Pepper

'Taste an Buy' Pepper

Now tell me if yuh dare that Jamaicans are not the most creative and exciting people on the face of the earth. Yuh ever hear bout ‘taste an buy?’

scotch bonnet peppers

The concept of ‘taste an buy’ is simple. A vendor, usually itinerant, is selling fruit. Now when yuh buying fruit, it is foolish to assume that they all taste alike. There are sweet mangoes and fresh mangoes, there are sweet oranges and ‘cut-nature’ sour oranges, etc.

The potential buyer is sometimes hesitant because he does not want to go home with a whole bag of mangoes and they are eitherwormy and fresh, or a bunch of ‘cut’ nature’ sour guineps. So the vendors developed the system of ‘taste an buy’, whereby they allow you to sample a fruit from the batch in the hope that you are so impressed that you will spend your money with them.

But of course the vendors are slick, so they have developed the art of putting two sweet mangoes at the top of a heap, or the sweet guinep at the front of the bunch, or selecting it for you to sample. “here man, try dah one here.” You are so impressed after you sample the fruit, that you pay good money for a bag of sour oranges, or guineps or fluxy mangoes, which you take home happily to your family and watch them all go into the garbage while you swear to find the vendor.

The concept behind ‘taste an buy’ is that you are supposed to sample the item right? Well I recently passed a man on Hope Road in Kingston selling scotch bonnet peppers , merrily calling out ‘taste an buy’.

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