Set by D A Prince The banana is, apparently, what literary theorists call "a floating signifier". We asked for other items from the fruit and veg stall

Report by Ms de Meaner

Many apologies to Philippa Legg, who had to be cut. Hon menshes to: Barbara Smoker and D A Prince. £20 to everyone but "Pip" (£15). Bill G also gets the Tesco vouchers.

The avocado's endomorphic appeal is inherently transsexual, a sumptuous and paradoxical, semantically reversionary delight, since the fruit's name is derived from ahuacatl, or testicle. Whether the ritual acts of slicing, peeling, paring, stoning and, indeed, crushing of this fruit (for instance, in the creation of guacamole, derived from both ahuacatl and molle, or sauce) is associated with fertility or infertility myths is a Frazeresque conundrum. The macrobrachial accompaniment popularised in the mid-1960s is a biosociological phenomenon. Consider: foetal shellfish are held in the hollow of a semi-testicular representation of the feminine hindquarters. And this is only for - as the anglophonic restaurateurs would have it - starters.

Bill Greenwell

The potato is that most chthonic of edibles, surfacing with its crust of raw earth, anthropomorphised, and read as an analogic sign as if it physically mirrored our latent hopes. Potatoes can wear features for the human believer - the face of the Prophet, of the Virgin Mary, of Wayne Rooney; for the profane and irreverent, they may appear to mimic publicly taboo portions of the anatomy. In short, a buried mystery must be symbolically validated as a benign, knowable object before it can be cooked and eaten. We consume the tuber on the plane of phantasy as a spectacle, spiritual or erotic according to taste, before positioning it in the gastronomic field, and thus invert the sequencing of Brecht's materialist motto Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. Yet how often has this crucial paradox gone unremarked.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Garlic lends the creative antagonism required to fuel ambivalent needs to self-express, through self-medicated herbalism and altruistic autism, an innate and almost autonomic desire to be left alone and yet be part of a defined group; to be understood to be participating in an elemental lifestyle statement that recognises a societal tendency to attribute oneself to a necessarily polarised antithesis. This allows a juxtaposed, multi-stratified paradox: You stink but you are healthy. All at once leveller yet class distinguisher. No other plant assaults as many senses; smelling and tasting the air while listening and watching as it fries means only texture remains. Don't smoke it.

John Griffiths-Colby

The grape, sweet testicle of youth, the first and second hypostasis, the principal priapic of creativity and life, giving of its pudendary juices after the sway underfoot, pumped in through the pore of the "womb-an" to gestate and ripen and then be dragged screaming into the world and on to the Lidl shelf.

Philippa Legg

No 3942 Fat-buster duster

Set by Valerie Yule

We want exercises for heart disease, obesity, etc, emphasising dual use, so put spin on the image of, say, rhythmic dusting or Hoovering.

Max 150 words by 10 August
E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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