Bananas
Edith Carson was the wonderful old lady with a fat fluffy grey cat, who lived next door when I was a child in Georgetown, Ontario. I do not use the term “wonderful” lightly. Mrs Carson baked a constant supply of cookies and tarts, to distribute among the neighbourhood’s children. I was a notorious suck-up to old ladies. (Still am.)
Among her many eccentricities, old Mrs Carson (whose young husband had been killed in the First World War; his photograph was still on her piano) was a conservationist. She did not like to waste anything, but would collect everything neatly. She was memorably opposed to the communists, who were putting fluoride in our drinking water. And most spectacularly, upon each return from the market, her bananas and other fruit would be cast about her lawn and garden. This was because each must “touch the earth,” and she could not be sure this had been omitted during modern industrial picking.
Make no mistake: she was very well informed about all dietary issues, and the better she was informed the more eccentric her views — generally in opposition to anything “new.”
We must stop “following the science.” The science tells us which of many tens of thousands of artificial ingredients and additives are almost certain not to kill the average person (right away), and should therefore be commercially available.
But what I need to know is whether the bananas have touched the earth, yet.