Fruit of all evil
A while ago, there was a piece of some length about a haunting image, of a rhinoceros taking the juice out of an orange, that I remembered noticing in a known fruit shop when I was smaller. If I had bothered to revisit the shop, to perform some research, it might have been a lot better – as it was, I had to pepper my words with frustrating speculation, which simply didn’t do.
Now, doubtless you’ll be warmly relieved to hear that, at last, I have revisited that place. We entered and bagged some clammy apples, before forming a pathetic clumpy kind of line beside the cash register – pathetic and clumpy and kind-of because the shop was empty, apart from us and a lady who was attacking the floor with a broom. Perceptively, she continued to sweep for some time before coming to be being paid for the apples, which let me conduct a thorough inspection of that image, which dangled from the ceiling where I’d remembered it. How did she know that I welcomed this? Clearly, the rhino is actually the only thing that draws all of the customers in, and the fruit is just there to be bought in guilt as a kind of souvenir, exactly like in a museum.
I did not take a photograph, because that would be weird. Inside the Louvre Museum, you probably can’t move for all the goggling photographic telephones, and that has a soothing effect, but even Ryanair (!) would admit that this exhibition was some distance from that kind of critical mass. I certainly didn’t offer to buy the artwork, not now I’d realised that it was the proprietors’ only means of putting tables of food on their family.
Still, I can remember what I saw, and I remember seeing that, in the cold fleshy light of day, the picture wasn’t quite as I’d remembered – which shouldn’t be cause for concern. The main thing was that I hadn’t imagined that picture. There it was. Flanking it was another rhino, and a zebra. The zebra was doing something to demonstrate – judging by the caption – the company’s easy-peel oranges. Why a zebra? Well, they’re a key demographic, I think. They like to cross roads – so do pelicans – and when you’re peeling an orange at the same time, it’s natural that you’ll want it to be as easy as possible, so you can concentrate on not getting run over. So it makes sense.
The zebra was an actor greatly talented at suggesting deeply nuanced emotions through nothing but the contortion of facial muscles, but later I thought, were the animals harmed in the production of the advert? It wasn’t clear. A bitter shock. If I’d looked into their eyes, what would I have seen?
Still more usefully, I was able to read the name of the company that had devised this work of commercial art, Outspan. With subsequent research I could see that this company, of South African origin, had once been a prodigious advertising force – most notably commissioning a fleet of orange-shaped cars – and that this prodigiousness would make it difficult to find out much my dangling cardboard thing, which was little more than a small potato in a sea of even more interesting mangoes.
Another thing: something rotten. The Outspan fruit brand was boycotted, particularly in the Netherlands, for regrettable involvement in nasty activities. “Don’t squeeze a South African dry”, we were told, “every bite buys a bullet”. I feel so naive – it’s like Andrew Sachs’s childhood memory of being enthralled by his hero Joe Stalin’s moustache, which was “big enough for a young lad like me to swing on”. (By the same principle, Sachs did dislike another fierce dictator, and that happened correct.)
Maybe the company is OK now. They have a whole page on their website about ethical initiatives. Some some smiling black children are now pictured in their marketing materials. Actually, the latter thing makes it seem like they hold them in the same esteem as they once did wild animals. Oh dear.
You might have heard about the recent and exciting development of individually packaged bananas, by Mr Del Monte. This has to be one of the most major milestones in the history of our society, right? Just think, there exist actual people whose job was to identify a crying need for someone to invent a system whereby they can buy a banana sealed in a bag. It is, quite simply, fantastic. Did the Romans have that? I think not. Who did the Romans think they were? It’s immediately apparent that they weren’t as good as us.
Prunes are worth a mention, always. I don’t know very much about them, but that should be no barrier. I am not pretending to be some kind of imbecilic cave anemone with all the togetherness of a microwave oven’s digital clock, but I like to think that by putting my mind to it I would be able to learn much more. Well, of course, having little idea of the UK prune knowledge average, I can’t be sure of where I stand in relation to it, but I’m well within my rights to hazard a self-effacing guess. (There simply must be some kind of index, whereby boffins determine the average per-capita knowledge of prunes. I bet the Romans had one.)
Previously, I presented some anecdotal evidence to support my vague theory that Corn Flakes have a detrimental effect on the togetherness of what one fires in the general direction of the old septic tank. Now, that’s a surprising link, for reasons that I outlined, and I did have to express my surprise at the existence of so unlikely a relationship, but wouldn’t you agree that this here surprise was only as surprising as, well, so much of what is held within this world? I certainly would.
A fun story approaches. On Wednesday, or Tuesday, or Thursday, but surely not any of the other days – if a member of the axis of evil threatened to force-feed nougat down my face, I would guess at the Wednesday with some confidence – I ate for breakfast some whole dried prunes, after first placing them about a skimmed milk–dampened aggregation of notorious flakes of product. I don’t need to continue – I can pretentiously flail in the direction of paying hommage to Mr Hemingway’s clever, boundary-pushing story about footwear, because it is quite enough to just set the scene, right? Any intelligent reader should be able to predict the outcome, especially if equipped with my warmest reassurances that it’s not too unpredictable, I promise. I wouldn’t have predicted the more gaseous elements of the tale, but those with intimate understandings of human innards can smugly contort their faces, “duh”, “no shit Sherlock”. (Well, rather, in truth, quite a lot of that.)
(That Hemingway man has a WordPress theme named after him. What an honour! I don’t have that, but the best way to get something done is to do it yourself.)