I'm willing to die to get them to stop putting little stickers on every single piece of fruit in the world. Someone has to come forward. Might as well be me. My series was canceled, anyway.
The supposed beauty of these stickers is that, if you're poisoned, you have a way of tracing the fruit back to a particular lot, a particular shipment, a particular grower. Of course, this assumes that you carefully removed the sticker and put it somewhere you can find it as you start to choke to death or break out in hives. Right. Then you grab the sticker, make your 800 call or visit the grower's website, and, before your funeral is over, the bad guys are locked up.
It's a beautiful system.
I wonder how much paper is used, and how much sticky gum, in labeling EVERY SINGLE *#@!* piece of fruit in America. Tons and of tons of paper. Tons and tons of adhesive. And how many worker-hours go into applying the little buggers? And how many of our hours go into into removing them?
How many people, for that matter, inadvertently eat the stickers, and then choke to death? There's an under-represented group. Who's looking out for them? I am.
We have a national mania for trying to protect ourselves from, well, everything. This one goes too far. Proponents of fruit-labeling will tell me that if such labeling saves even one life, it's worth it. I dispute that. I'm not so sure. Maybe we need to sacrifice someone occasionally on the altar of common f**king sense.
If I have to be the sacrificial lamb, so be it. It's a far, far better world I go to, where fruit isn't labeled, and I can put my time, money, attention, and paper to better use.
Then let's go after shrink wrap. And aluminum foil under the tops of yogurt. Come on! Ingest a little poison sometimes! Better that a few of us die than continuing to clog our landfill with all the plastic and aluminum that lie beneath the cap of EVERY SINGLE ITEM WE PURCHASE FROM A PHARMACY OR GROCERY STORE.
We can't, and needn't, try to protect each other from the occasional psycho who wants to poison someone. Look at the price we're paying. (And I'll bet someone will write: how can you put a price tag on saving a life?) Better to draw lots, sacrifice the occasional consumer, and let the rest go free. They will thank you, the trees will thank you. Makers of little tiny fruit stickers and shrink-wrap will not.
