A few moments ago I was by the sink eating cherries out of a bag with methodical inefficiency. I’d reach into the bag, take out a cherry, run it under the tap for a second, dry it off with a paper towel, then eat it. I should have just washed a bunch of cherries en masse, because that would have been faster, but it didn’t occur to me to do that. I was too tired.
I could have just not washed the cherries. That probably would have been okay. I have the habit of washing fruit because it seems like the right thing to do what with pesticides and so on, but don’t cherries grow on trees? Do people even spray pesticides up trees? Well, maybe they do. I know nothing about the logistics of harvesting cherries.
I almost never buy or eat fruit of any kind. It seems strange. It seems more natural to just eat manufactured junk. If I live surrounded by processed bullshit, it would make sense for me to eat it too.
The cherry bag has “Product of Chile” printed on it. I bought this bag at the supermarket last night. References to Chile were all over the fruit section. The nectarines were advertised as “Chilean nectarines.” The plums were “Chilean plums.”
But Chile was the only South American country represented. I didn’t see any “Bolivian nectarines” on sale. I didn’t see any “Argentine plums.” There was no competition, so why did they bother advertising that this stuff came from Chile? Why is it important that a nectarine be “Chilean”?
The cherries I bought smell better than they taste. That will, I think, be true of all food someday. Once we’ve driven every species of plant on Earth to extinction, we’ll start making fruit in factories. We’ll make every fruit out of the same stuff. The sprayed-on scent will be the only way to tell the difference between a synthetic nectarine and a synthetic plum.
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