Smaller fruits, often berries such as currant, elder, rowan, wild rose fruits, raspberries, grapes, small vacciniums, and the like, became the fare. This is the jujube fruit, Zizyphus jujuba , whose center of diversity is thought to be in the Eastern Mediterranean, around Syria. Nevertheless, we quite possibly had to turn more to leafy plants to satisfy our vitamin C needs at some times of year. There is a very good range of fruit available to middle class Western people now. People with low disposable incomes can afford little fresh fruit, .
Soft fruit have a very short shelf life.
The species of fruit we eat are constrained primarily by their storability. If they won't keep, the in-store losses are too great to be able to offer the fruit to the public. One of the great dilemmas of fruit supply is that fruit have to be very firm to stand handling and transport. Nectarines are picked and sold hard, the same with peaches and stone fruit. Stone fruit that is picked when firm very often hasn't developed the level of fruit sugars and flavor components that our sense of taste demands.