#68 Attack of the Killer Strawberries

The other day I was helping my bride unpack groceries. Well, unpack some of them; we had a lot of loose items from Costco that require no bag shucking. We long ago learned to turn down the seemingly innocent request from the Costco clerk to provide us with a box or boxes with our market booty. Come trash day, it was just one more three-dimensional piece of cardboard I had to reduce to two, and I got really tired of putting out large, empty, flattened cartons of Summers Eve for my recycling guy to wonder about. Besides, much as I like Costco, I think they should do their own dang recycling.
So, one of the loose items was a carton of strawberries. I looked at it suspiciously. It was late February at the time and I didn’t remember from my boyhood days in the California desert whether strawberries ripened this time of year, so I thought I’d try to determine the South American quasi-democracy of origin of said fruit. I was surprised. It said Imperial Valley California. How do you like that? I thought. The Imperial Valley, widely know as the figurative armpit of California, and they already had strawberries in late February. I looked at the fruit through the clear plastic of its clamshell container. They were gigantic! This genetic engineering has come a long frickin way. All those bad atomic radiation gigantic grasshopper B-movies from the fifties flashed through my brain in one chittering nano-second. Headlines spiraled in and slapped down on the newsdesk of my mental cinema: “Elderly grandmother chokes on gargantuan fruit!” “Colossal Strawberries rule the world.” “Look at the size of that smoothie!”
I shook my head and put down the box. Wait a minute, my subconscious chimed in; weren’t you just looking through a plastic clamshell? I looked at the container again. Sure enough, the plastic clamshell container was there all right, but it was nestled in a cardboard box. Oh my god! This is much, much worse than giant bees, grasshoppers, carrot aliens and the blob combined. It’s... Its... Overpackaging! We’ve found another way to add more crap to the waste stream. I mean here you have these genetically engineered strawberries. Not, as you might expect, genetically engineered for taste, no, that would be too logical, why waste all that dangerous science on something as ephemeral as flavor? They’re genetically engineered to survive the trip to the grocer’s shelf. I mean, these things may look impressive but they’re as hard as country western girl friend’s heart. You could play hackysack with these things and still take em to the table. Hell, you couldn’t bruise one of these things in a soccer game, mom. So then you wrap it in a plastic clamshell for its shipment to the stores and then, so you won’t damage the plastic clamshell, you enclose it in stackable open-topped cardboard boxes for transshipment across the state. Kinda thoughtful in a way. Use all that oil and energy to make the plastic, cut down all those trees and dump all those dioxins from paper processing in the environment to make the cardboard, all to deliver a genetically-engineered, gigantic, bright red, enticing piece of fruit to my table. And it has no flavor. Is this a great country or what?
America, ya gotta love it.