Order out of chaos - A short tale about strange fruits

Once upon a time there was a greengrocer in Barcelona's Boqueria market. He was famous for arranging all the fruits in well-ordered piles like the one shown in the photo. He was a great specialist in strawberries and oranges and was highly estimated among his colleagues. Then, one day one of them, also quite highly esteemed not for his piling of fruits but for their production came to him and proposed him to join in a new enterprise. The producer was planning to go into the grape business and he wanted him to think of a way to pile them up properly. Our greengrocer had never worked with grapes before but he had not become famous for turning down interesting offers so he accepted. He then decided to hire a guy to think for a way to pile up the grapes even before the grapes were delivered. The wannabe "piler" arrived at the market bench full of enthusiasm and started devising a number of ways to pile-up the grapes all neatly and nicely. He made a lot of effort to understand the shape and size of the grapes, read a lot about them in books and ended up with an acceptable piling strategy that could at least work with the grapes he had in mind.

Both the greengrocer and the piler were quite happy, when one day, a guy whose bench was on the other side of the market suddenly appeared with a small number of grapes piled up in what looked to be a nicely-shaped cone. Both our heroes were rather puzzled, because of the fact that the way they had thought about was resembling more a pyramid than a cone. In any case they started thinking about how the two strategies could be combined, when suddenly greengrocers all around started piling up fresh grapes on their benches. The greengrocer was really saddened. Only a short time ago he thought of this strange fruit as a possible prospect which would only moderately expand his customers. Now all his competitors were going into the grape business before him and, even worse, it seemed like everybody wanted grapes. Grapes had become fashionable.

The frustration of the poor piler was even bigger. You see, he had spent a lot of time studying the grapes, he thought he had understood them and now he would see all sorts and kinds of these strange fruits piled-up around him that were nothing like each other. Some would be big enough to look like kiwi, others would come in small beads resembling big berries. Some where bright red like strawberries and other pale-yellow like potatos. When he tried to compare one type with another his frustration increased even more. He realized that some of the merchants, when talking about grapes were only referring to one specific type which would be better piled in the shape of a cone, others would pile their own in cubes and so on...

As time passed by the situation became even worse. The competitor greengrocers were starting to make strange allocations about their grapes, piling them up on top of other fruits, suggesting that grapes were to be piled up with oranges and apples and pears, and as you may have imagined, each one had a different combination in mind. Naturally the greengrocer was more and more anxious and kept asking of his helper to think of even more complex ways to pile up the fruit, while nothing would suggest that there was a good or a bad way to do so. It just seemed like everybody would do their own thing, call it a pile of grapes and not care about each other. The piler had not learned to work like this, and neither the greengrocer. Both of them were coming from a school of greengrocers, were the fruits shape and colour were well defined first and then piled-up accordingly. Thus they were in agreement that they should define the fruit first before the pile.

But the problem was that the more the piler strolled up and down the market, carefully approaching the benches and observing the piles, the more frustrated he would get. It was turning out that some of the competitor greengrocers were using other kind of fruit to support the piles, others would mix more than one type of grapes in the same pile, there were a few that were using two types of piles at the same time and even some that were cheating by taking piles of cherries and calling them grapes.

On top of all that the producer which has made the initial deal with the greengrocer arrived finally with the grapes he had promised in the very beginning. In fact it was his assistant who had come to bring the merchandise as initially arranged. And to the disappointment of both our heroes, the grapes she was carrying were exactly what they feared of. There she was putting in front of them all possible kinds of grapes, small and big, spherical and oval, bright red and yellow and pale-white. She had been working for months in the production of grapes, she new everything that had to do with the production as the piler new almost everything that had to do with their possible organization. And there they were the two of them with a bunch of incoherent, strange fruit that could not be organized in one but in many ways.

As their employers were growing more and more impatient, the grape-piler and the grape-cultivator were quite puzzled, walking up and down the market over and over, trying to think of the solution to their problem which was of dual nature. The cultivator wanted to know which type of the grapes were the right ones, -that is if there were one type-. And the piler wanted to make sure that this type was piled properly. Their thoughts were oscillating back and forth from the most daring hypotheses to the most down to earth compromises. Once they would come to think that there was only one type of grapes and all the rest were fakes, then they would ponder one whether the real grapes were a mixture of all these variations. They could not decide on whether the pile shape was to be one or more than one. And they would come to a real confusion when people would ask them about the other type of surrounding fruit and whether the shape of their piles were to affect the one of the grapes.

All the piler could come down to was that this had become a big mess, that this chaos was not to be put into order.

And I am not very sure but maybe this is the end of the story. Or maybe not.