This morning I woke up with a brutal headache and a sore throat. I blamed it on the Guinness the night before. While the effect of a couple of beers should wear off, the brain pain didn't. When I finally sat in the plane back to Grenoble, after nearly missing it not just once but twice, my nose started to run and my eyes to burn. I didn't even find delight in the New Yorker I had bought just before.
Back home I determined I was suffering from some sort of drizzle-and-cold-induced malaise and I went to the grocery store to buy ingredients for a fruit salad to give my immune system much needed ammunition. I chucked carrots and oranges, grapefruits and apples into my cart but stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the bananas, country of origin Côte d'Ivoire. They were blotchy and brown, quite obviously civil war bananas, probably grown between the front lines. I imagine harvest is a dare-and-die exercise with doomed souls collecting rotten fruit from a recently shelled grove. You have to be quick harvesting because the next round of enemy fire (and there's nothing but enemy fire) might reduce the remaining bananas to a dirty yucky pulp, of which you'd be a part.
I'm doing really well with my cold in comparison, and I hope the grapefruit and unreasonably long hours of sleep tonight will put my body back into drive.
3 comments:
whoa
front line bananas
so is that a reason to buy or to not buy?
Well, my first reaction was, I won't buy from a region at war. Then I was thinking that selling bananas is all the civilians can do to survive.
I didn't buy any in the end because I can't imagine some farmer in a war-torn country pulling off an independent banana export business. Trade is controlled by those with the guns, and they'll take the profit. It's like blood diamonds.
Buying civil war bananas will not help the population but might sustain the conflict. That's what I think, anyway.
omg
a little trip to the supermarket ends in an ethical dilemma. Reminds me of some buy-local ppl that were on the radio the other day. It's hard work but in the end I guess it's worth it, even if you don't wind up eating bananas much.
They have to can their stuff themselves since they buy from farmers around their area ie Vermont and places like that that don't have bananas.
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