This week I did something noble and heroic. Something to be proud of and to tell my children and grandchildren about. Something everyone who cares about the state of the world should hope to emulate.
I abused a genetically modified food protestor.
9 AM. Fresh out of bed, hung over or still drunk and looking for raw flesh, I tossed on a bathrobe and some slippers and found my way down to the nearest supermarket. This is the only way to shop: too surly to think better of buying a ten dollar steak, too hungry not to put it back and get a five dollar roast instead.
Situated outside, a well-scrubbed duo with a banner and pamphlets champion the downtrodden, the underdogs of the produce department: organic fruits and vegetables. (I use these terms loosely: most underdogs don’t demand twice the price of the standard article, which seems to be the going rate for things labeled Organic.) This is the New Food, brought to you by the New Hippie. Conservatively dressed, drug-free, passionate and neatly shaved.
We were blissfully ignorant of each other on the way in. Maybe I look too surly to be bothered about string beans. I move through the market cleanly and efficiently. These places are designed to trap you, to cast you out into the sea of lost souls, wandering isle after isle searching for potato chips, frozen dinners, ice cream pops, precooked chicken, machine-made California rolls. There’s no time for all that. If I don’t get five pounds of some animal into me in the next half hour, I won’t see another sunrise. So I’m a shark. A ravenous shark in a high threadcount hotel robe seeking the shanks of some unfortunate diver.
But wait. Those were oranges, weren’t they? I could go for orange juice. I’d like orange juice very much. Right. Oranges. Not much of a detour, back on track. Rib roast, milk, bags and bags of candy. I’m set, I’m out of here, I’m free. It’s time to go rub this roast down with salt and green pepper, fry up some onions and pretend that it’s a four inch thick steak. And quick, because my body’s had to learn to do photosynthesis using alcohol fumes and phlegm just to keep me from dropping dead right there.
Out the door and on the way to the car when the man with the pamphlets stops me. He’s got a look that people who have found god have, and his god is a big tasty organic tomato. “Are you aware that the A&P sells genetically modified foods and that those oranges you have there might contain fish DNA?”
What?
Information has ceased to be processed. I’m staring at him, but I’m not really; I’m looking into the middle-distance, eyes glossing over, mouth hanging dumbly open. My oranges are the Devil in this equation.
“It’s true, scientists sometimes put animal genes and growth hormones into plants if the animal is more resilient to a bad climate or something like that.”
He’s given me what I need to kickstart my brain, and I’m angry. I had a few seconds of peace, and now I’ve been dragged back to argue about produce. Might as well do it well. I call him a dupe, tell him that’s not how food crops work, that the idea of fish genes getting into oranges is probably the result of a bad drug experience. He leans in now, looking something that might be conspiratorial. He’s met someone who’s put some thought into his pet issue. Maybe he can make a die-hard believer of me, he thinks. So he says in a voice that makes me think he’s afraid food scientists are listening in, “but still, it’s all so tasteless, am I right? You can’t beat good organic food on taste.”
“I’ve had GM tomatoes that were better than organic.” I get that out of the way immediately, and don’t admit that 95% of the time he’s absolutely right on that point. He looks incredulous. “They took those really tasty little tomatos and combined them with a beefsteak tomato, so it was a really big, really tasty tomato…” and I pause, stare into the middle-distance again. Tomatoes, I think stupidly to my hungover self, are pretty good.
He snaps me back into reality, calling my bluff. “But most of the time organic is better.”
“This isn’t about taste,” I remind him. “If you were protesting tasteless food, you’d be out to get tofu.”
He forces a laugh. I think I’ve offended him; I think he feels strongly about tofu. “You’re right,” he concedes, and he’s on to the next talking point. “You just don’t know how modifying food is going to affect us. You could have like, a peach with an arm. Man. We’ve never done anything like this before, it’s not healthy.” He adds the “man” in the middle as though it were an afterthought, a little nod to his hipster roots.
“Of course we’ve done it before. We’ve been doing it for as long as we’ve grown food crops, and our food did it by itself before that.” Get a shave and a job, you damn hippie, I mentally add, and then conciously smooth out my four-day stubble.
“But we’ve never done it with science before, and we just have no idea what will happen, we just don’t know.” Goddamn science ruins yet another good thing. Even through the haze of surliness and hunger I can tell he’s falling apart. He didn’t come here to argue with anyone, especially not some scowling, unwashed sociopath in an obviously pinched bathrobe. He just wanted to show everybody how wonderful organic food is. I feel sorry for him, but it’s too late now. We’re already on the road to ruin. Somebody has to pay for my hangover and it’s not going to be me.
Not just me.
“We do know what’ll happen. That’s the point of science. That’s why it’s science and not voodoo. I’m completely against voodoo modified food. Anyways, GM crops are the most rig…” a word is lost. I pause, find a replacement. “Carefully tested and regulated food crops in North America. Most importantly, genetically modified food keeps maybe a billion starving people from dying, what’s wrong with that?”
The next thing he says puts me over the edge. He’s left reason and decency behind and become a character in an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit. Infact, in retrospect, this whole thing has played out a lot like that episode of Bullshit. It’s hard to believe that such crazyshit people exist until you find yourself in this situation. I bet he thought the same about me. What he says is this: “right, yeah, they’re alive, but what kind of people will they be after they’ve eaten that stuff?”
I may be a master of rhetoric, but even my eloquence, coherence and impecable sense of decency and respect for my fellow man have run out. I dig into the clear plastic bag of oranges, hold one aloft. “Imagine that this is an organic orange. It might not be, but imagine it is. Imagine you have no qualms whatsoever with eating it, because it is perfectly healthful and delicious. I have a demonstration for you.” I mug at the orange, then look up to him, then back to the orange. I feel like the point needs to be stressed as much as possible: orange good.
He looks at me, halfway entertained. He feels that he knows what’s coming. He’s formulating a response already. He moves to cross his arms, and I huck the orange as hard as I can at his chest. It splits open at the sides, he skitters back, and the orange rolls, egglike, to rest by my foot. There’s a thick ring of pebbles and dirt clinging to it.
“Look at the organic orange,” I demand, and slam my foot into it. My slipper cleaves it nearly in twain and it sails through the air trailing juice. It hits my assistant’s car’s bumper and comes to rest against the wheel of the range rover next to mine.
“When you’re hungry enough that you’d eat and enjoy that organic orange but you’d still turn down a GM orange, let’s have this argument again.” I understand the value of visual demonstration.
Again in retrospect, I’m not sure that this proves anything except that he wouldn’t eat that nasty-ass beaten up orange unless he was really hungry. It seemed to make sense to both of us at the time though, because he looked chastised, not to mention shocked, as he stared at his shoes, or his pamphlets, or anything except me.
I stomp away, angrier now that I have orange juice and dirt on my slipper. Something I can’t blame someone else for. This isn’t what I need to start my day off. Now I want to get out of here just as much as the hippie, and I luckily do not have some lunatic who stole his wardrobe from the Hilton blocking my way. So I fuckoff as fast as I can. Driving away, I lean out of the window and add a final, vital point: “I’m your real dad!”
Penn & Teller are great, but it sucks when life imitates Bullshit. Life is better when it imitates Robot Chicken.
Fortinbras
Grammaticus
The Plucky Sidekick
Improvidence