Monday, November 28, 2005

Waxed, Sprayed, and Dyed

Pink Martini, the band, is really very extraordinary. Major kudos to Danielle for introducing me.

But anyway, the ponder point of today: fruit and what we do to it.

Pick up an orange in the grocery store. Or an apple or pear. It's waxed. Yep, that's right, waxed. Not that fruit is hairy or anything-- the wax keeps moisture in and makes it shiny and luscious. Isn't that weird?

Bananas, as well as oranges, are sprayed with ethylene gas to hasten ripening. I'm no expert, but ethylene sounds like a petroleum product to me.

So, we wax 'em, we spray 'em, and lastly, we dye them. You guys have seen the oranges and bananas that are not uniformly orange or yellow but mottled with green and brown, right? That's fruit au natural. We inject fruit with dye to eliminate spots and make it more appealing to consumers.

Gosh. Can we blame this on Hollywood? Must we wax, spray, and dye our fruit as well as ourselves?

And the bitch of it is: it's not working. Women are more attractive than ever before, what with shrunken thighs and bleached teeth and boob jobs and whatnot. Fruit is available 365 days of the year in shiny uniform goodness. And still, divorce and obesity rates continue to increase.

Hmmm.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think we need to go a little deeper than that. Yep, we like everything to look "pretty"--as defined by whom?--but maybe we also need to rethink our entire approach to food. If you
demand fresh fruit all year round, that fruit's going to be shipped from somewhere far away--probably with govenment subsidies supporting the transport either overtly or covertly--and so, it's has to be chemically suppressed and enhanced. Just like the women--because otherwise, they're out of the picture!