The Scottosphere

Great news! But they’d bet­ter hurry—I’m tired of eat­ing at Chipotle.

And the award for this month’s most inge­nious new food prod­uct goes to… Trop­i­cana Trop50. Spot­ted today at the gro­cery store. It’s orange juice, diluted 1:1 with water (plus a few chem­i­cal addi­tives) and sold at a higher price in a smaller container—get this—as a “light and healthy” alter­na­tive to actual OJ. Because, you know, oranges are a lead­ing cause of obe­sity and ill health.

A few fas­ci­nat­ing things I’ve learned from Dan Koeppel’s op-ed, “Yes, We Will Have No Bananas”:

• Bananas travel thou­sands of miles, rather than hun­dreds, and spoil in weeks, rather than months, yet they cost half as much as apples.
• Amer­i­cans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined.
• Bananas became pop­u­lar in North Amer­ica only after aggres­sive marketing.
• Despite the exis­tence of more than 1,000 vari­eties, bananas in the US are all the same: the Cavendish.
• The Cavendish is infe­rior in taste to the banana our great-grandparents ate.
• Reliance on a sin­gle vari­ety of banana will even­tu­ally result in another wide­spread crop destruc­tion due to disease.

Bananas in Egypt were different—and grown locally along the Nile, no less. Now I feel guilty for call­ing them “weird bananas.”

Read­ers of food lit­er­a­ture are famil­iar with the dan­gers of mono­cul­ture. It’s a shame that the industrial-age tech­niques we devel­oped to make food cheap and acces­si­ble to every­one have also brought us infe­rior taste, reduced nutri­tional value, and increased sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to disaster.