Quick, what is the fruit that is the easiest to peel and eat without any mess or even getting your hands soiled?
Bananas would seem to come out an easy winner. The banana seems so perfectly designed to be eaten easily that evangelist Ray ‘Banana Man’ Comfort and his trusty sidekick, the Boy Wonder Kirk Cameron, saw it as incontrovertible proof that god had designed it, and thus they called it ‘the atheist’s nightmare’.
But a German-owned supermarket chain committed the sin of thinking that they can improve on god’s handiwork and decided to market pre-peeled bananas on plastic trays wrapped in plastic foil.
As a result of outraged protests from environmentalists, the product has been discontinued.
Which is just as well, since otherwise god would surely have smitten (smited? smote?) them for their blasphemy.
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Enkidum
September 25, 2012 at 12:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I believe the correct form is “smut”.
Zinc Avenger (Sarcasm Tags 3.0 Compliant)
September 25, 2012 at 12:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Just as well the Germans relented, I’m not sure how much more smiting New Orleans can take.
michaeld
September 25, 2012 at 12:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Am I the only one that wanted to say orange
Also for anyone who doesn’t know how to properly peel a banana! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBJV56WUDng
left0ver1under
September 25, 2012 at 12:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I thought you were going to say grapes. There was a variety of grapes I encountered in Korea that the skin was easily removes from the contents. People usually held the skin with their fingertips and sucked out the meat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoho_(grape)
Personally, I never liked them, but I’ve never liked grapes anyway.
coragyps
September 25, 2012 at 12:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As Taj Majal once sang:
“Moses stood on the Red Sea shore
Smotin’ that water with a two-by-four”
machintelligence
September 25, 2012 at 1:15 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I had to look it up. It is smite/smote/smitten. For extra credit, what is the present tense of the verb whose participle is “wrought” (as in What hath God wrought?)
Ray de Silva
September 26, 2012 at 4:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wreak. Easy.
beverlystapleton
September 25, 2012 at 1:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
For fuck’s sake, really? this is the best that they can come up with and claim it to be “an atheist’s nightmare”?
I don’t know what kind of drugs that they are on, but they surely need to share with the rest of us.
jaytheostrich
September 25, 2012 at 1:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
You could probably make some ‘smut’ if you froze the bananas first.. just saying.
rvkevin
September 25, 2012 at 1:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s actually not a bad idea. They just forgot to slice them. That would actually confer time savings to the consumer.
Strewth
September 25, 2012 at 1:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I believe it is wreak – wreaking – wrought.
Also – I like the little clementine oranges better than bananas. The peel is dry, you can eat the contents with your hands without getting sticky, and they’re easier to share, coming pre-sectioned.
davidhart
September 25, 2012 at 1:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Thanks Michaeld, I’m going to try that.
Of course, I was well into my 20s before I discovered that the easy way to remove the leafy head of a pineapple is not to cut it, but to twist it off.
hyphenman
September 25, 2012 at 4:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Good afternoon Mano,
Of course the modern banana bears little resemblance to the fruit as gawd created it and is in fact the results of thousands of years of human intervention in the form of careful, man-driven, selection.
Do all you can to make today a good day,
Jeff
Have Coffee Will Write
Aliasalpha
September 25, 2012 at 7:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Why do environmentalists have a problem with peeled bananas? Granted they’re stinky disgusting things (and the bananas aren’t much better *rimshot*) but I don’t see how they’re an environmental issue unless the company is dumping the skins in rivers or something.
Mano Singham
September 25, 2012 at 7:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It was using all that plastic unnecessarily that was the problem.
Aliasalpha
September 25, 2012 at 9:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh… Yeah, kinda glaringly obvious when you think about it… Duh
Kilian Hekhuis
September 26, 2012 at 8:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Plastic can be recycled, even post-throwing away, while banana peels can only be recycled when thrown away in a special organic matter bin. So you could make a case for it being even more environmently friendly to sell them in a box…
Jared A
September 26, 2012 at 10:58 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
There is a reason the order is “reduce, reuse, recycle”. Recycling is much less efficient then reusing, which is less efficient then just not using at all (reducing).
Plastics are not easily recycled, and usually cannot be reused for the same purpose, so even if you are recycling you are still wasting.
BecomingJulie
September 26, 2012 at 10:02 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
At a guess, what they are not happy about is the fact that the banana peel (which is biodegradable) is being replaced by a mixture of difficult-to-recycle oil-based plastics (expanded polystyrene trays and PVC film).
EAT THEM AS GAWD INTENDED HEATHENS…! | Have Coffee Will Write
September 25, 2012 at 4:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
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