Rethinking the orange

The people who know about such things say that we make, in a single day, gazillions* of decisions. And that's before we get out of bed.

But with most things, we have to decide whether the time and effort we put into something is worth it. Like growing and harvesting your own tiny cherry tomatoes in a container, which entails planting, watering, fertilizing, fretting, moving the container into the sun, moving it out of the sun, chasing away pests, begging the plants to grow, praying for them to grow, threatening to tear them up, vowing to never ever grow anything again. And this is just the first week. Or, you can buy tomatoes from someone else who has done these things, leaving you free to, say, make the decision to stay in bed a little longer each morning.

Or cooking. There is planning, shopping, choosing, chopping, sautéing, turning, burning, scraping off the burnt parts, chasing away bugs, chasing away impatient eaters, seasoning, plating, serving, cleaning up. All that, and then the food is consumed in three minutes flat, if the eaters are in my family.

Or folding your underwear before putting them in the drawer. Or, for some people, even putting them in a drawer. (The Hero is sometimes consumed with inventing a system whereby we just get our clothes from the dryer as we need them, bypassing drawers and hampers and laundry baskets altogether.)

And then there is eating. Some foods are just too much work. A college roommate refused to eat seafood that needed to be shelled first. Of course in college we could rarely afford seafood, so this stand was more of a principle thing. But still.

A colleague and I discovered that neither of eats oranges because, although we like oranges, they obviously do not like to be eaten. If they did, they would make it a lot easier for us. The peel, for example, cannot easily be coaxed away. You must gouge it with your fingernails, repeatedly, and the orange, not unreasonably, fights back. Hard. You are likely to be left with juice, pulp, and other vital orange innards all over your hands, face, and clothes. The orange has nothing to lose by attacking you. And attack it will. You will find yourself in need of one of those disaster cleanup outfits to come in and scrub away the signs of massacre.

Even a grapefruit is preferable, opening-wise, to an orange. Yes, a grapefruit is work.  But all the work can be done with a tool, and does not require you to disfigure your flesh in the opening and cutting of it. Neither is there usually a need to call in Disaster Recovery.

I sincerely hope that our next president will give this issue the attention it deserves. For starters, oranges need either a) an edible peeling, such as the eminently sensible apple, pear, or grape, or b) one of those peelings that whips off in four easy steps, like the banana. And once THAT’S settled, maybe we can turn our attention to kohlrabi, which has to be peeled not once but TWICE.

Disaster Relief cannot come too soon.

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*This is a highly scientific fact.