Going Bananas

The cute guy is being a good sport about my current surge to eat local, support the small farmers, vote with our forks as they say and minimize our carbon handprint. He's given up eatting bananas which I interpret as I love you. A lot. Just last fall we talked about installing a hook beneath the kitchen cabinet so we could hang bananas until they were ripe, rip them off as if we were monkeys and ape around the kitchen.

I love bananas for the way they taste and the soft texture but for the cute guy I think it's that they are instant satisfaction. There's no washing, no slicing, no bowl, a minimum amount of peeling which he can leave on the counter for me to throw away. They seem to be perpetually in season. What's not to love? And neither of us worried as we tossed them blindly in our basket if they were organic or not. When comparing the two we've always liked the unorganic more. They taste better. And we lied to ourselves that the thick skins would protect us and then we believed the lie.

Last night we talked about them, the bananas, and the fleets of jets or semi's, maybe ships that must be employed every day to bring us our daily supply. I thought we should have been wearing ruby crusted crowns instead of playing jungle beasts when we ate them as casually as if they grew in our backyard instead of being ferried across foreign lands to the store on the corner for our convenience.

Now we are eatting west coast fruits instead. Oxnard strawberries, California cherries and peaches, pink lady Washington apples, the last of the organic kumquats. This isn't a season for complaining. The cute guy is happily cleaning, peeling, spitting pits and slicing. A little late for work maybe, but happy. I'm not arrogant or nieve enough to think we'll never eat bananas again, love does have its season of waning, but I think it will be a special occassion. An occassion fit for a king and a queen.