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, in those days. (Still am.)
Among her many eccentricities, old Mrs Carson (whose young husband had been killed in France during the First World War; his photograph was still atop her piano) was a conservationist. She did not like to waste anything, but would collect it all 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 melons would be cast about her lawn and garden. This was because each must touch the earth, and she couldn’t be sure each had touched it yet, given industrial picking technology.
As for the vegetables, she grew most of them herself.
Make no mistake: she was expert in all dietary issues, and the better she was informed the more controversial her views — generally in opposition to anything “new.”
We must stop obeying the communists — I agree with Mrs Carson. Their laboratory hands tell us which of many ten-thousands of poisonous additives and preservatives will (almost certainly) not kill the average, healthy person (right away), and if they are listed in microscopic type in the least visible place on the label, may be inserted inside everything.
This, however, doesn’t interest me.
What I want to know is whether the bananas have touched the earth, yet.