Friday, February 8, 2019

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

In this highly readable psychological thriller, a famous painter shoots her husband repeatedly in the face and then clams up and refuses to talk to anybody. How rude! I certainly do not endorse that kind of behavior. I also do not endorse all this nonsense about 'organic foods.' And believe me, I am pissed off at people on all sides of this. My Uncle Ray was a farmer, and if he knew that people were changing the genes of their crops or squirting hormone cocktails into their cows, he would absolutely shit himself. Which he actually did once, after a dinner party featuring Aunt Martha's meat loaf, but that is beside the point. When I was growing up, we had a word for what is now called organic food. It was, 'food.' Nobody even thought of creating Frankenfood in a lab somewhere. So I am pretty angry at all these mad food scientists that have made this debate necessary. But here's another thing. When I was a kid, we would go to the market, and we knew who had good tomatoes and who had crap tomatoes. You just looked at them, and it was obvious. Now, if you check out the tomatoes, and they look good, you assume they've been injected with steroids or grown hydroponically in a pesticide bath or something. So you have to have an awkward conversation with some farmer who got up at 2am to schlep his vegetables all the way into town and then you walk away like a total snob, which you are. And meanwhile, the guy who sold the crap tomatoes still sells crap tomatoes, only now he gets to call his 'organic' crap tomatoes and charge 5 times as much. So screw him too! Ah, but how can we tell what is really organic? We need a whole new crop of bureaucratic middlemen, of course! These are people who couldn't grow weeds on shit but they now have the power to bestow the gilded title of 'organic' on those who meet their whimsical standards or are willing to pay bribes. Oh, pick your jaw up off the floor. You think there is no corruption in this business? It is business, after all. But today, I am most angry at supermarkets. They are laughing all the way to the bank about this tomfoolery, because it means they get to charge 4 dollars for a cauliflower just by intimating that if you buy a non-organic cauliflower, you will either grow a third arm or drop dead in the parking lot before you even reach your car. So I walk in to get some apples, and there are two bins. A bin of regular apples, and a bin of identical apples with bright orange 'organic' stickers. I thought it might be a fun experiment to peel off some of those stickers and see if the mopey teenager at the cash register whose parents forced him to get an after school job because he was playing 8 hours of Fortnite a day could tell the difference between the two apples. But the stickers don't come off that easily, and they leave a thick, slimy residue on the apple. Is that glue organic, I wonder? Was it made from the hooves of free range horses who eat bruised local kale salads? I think the act of putting those stickers on the fruit actually renders them no longer organic, but I will probably have to bribe someone at the USDA to find out if I am correct or not. In the end, I bought a banana. It was not satisfying.


  1. Gave up on store tomatoes long ago; organic or not, they have so little flavor, you can't tell when you've bit into the container versus the tomato. I just grow my own. Mom and Dad have a couple of apple trees. I stock up when I go. It's getting harder to find good food. I suggest, since spring is nigh (at least in Texas) that you plant a pot or two of tomatoes on the porch/backyard/wherever. Bonus: No stickers! No tomfoolery. Organic if you want. Happy Spring!

  2. Tell me about it. We clearly live in different climates - nothing to be grown around here these days. Although I do have a lemon tree I haul in every winter. Damn good lemons.

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