It’s Summer time, which means it’s time for scrumptious 2 dollar boxes of blueberries from the fruit cart, 12 dollar melons from the Farmer’s Market, and 22 dollar organic watermelons from Foragers. Life is good! Yes, the blueberries are covered in toxic pesticides, yes it took 45 minutes to get to the Farmer’s Market, and yes you could have bought a bag of weed and fruit from the cart with that 22 dollars and had some real fun (and not care about the pesticides). But the point is that you want to eat fruit that came out of the ground and not lite, watermelon, blueberry-flavored Slurpees from the third 7-Eleven that just opened up around the corner. Let’s face it: life isn’t good. Foodiness™ makes it hard!
So in tonight’s Rerun Amok — You Can’t Have A Proustian Fruit Moment With A Grape Gummy — I get real about what foodiness has done to fruit; how, whether it’s poisoned pears and tasteless tangerines or fat-free fruit Go-Gurts and blueberry-colored flavor-dots, you can’t trust fruit (see Napoleon, Larry Craig, Tom Cruise); how we’re so far down the foodiness™ rabbit hole with fruit that children today don’t have a Proustian first-time with fruit anymore, but rather with fruit-flavored Gummy Bears and strawberry colored Swedish Fish; how phony “fruit” facsimiles lead to facsimiles across the board (see Auto-Tune replacing voices, reality shows replacing reality, Tweeting replacing experiences); and how to get real, which is to eat fruit over an oat-bran protein fruit bar and an organic apple over a toxic apple, and to just accept that when it comes to fruit, it’s pretty f*ed…but at least you had an unforgettable childhood first-fruit experience, and can pronounce “Proust.”
So if you don’t want to eat shit and you do want to justify spending money on fruit instead of weed, tune in!