Concerning a lamentable tendency lately arisen in fruit stands

If not every where one goes, then certainly each where purveying fruits I have recently gone, the following is observable: much proud boasting as to the sweetness of the pink grapefruits for sale, and, if the store thinks well of itself, perhaps some white grapefruitish thing as well, called Oro Blanco, an ungainly cross between grapefruit and pomelo. As one might expect of things which undermine decency, the pink (note that they haven't even got the stones to be properly red) grapefruit come from Texas. "SUPER SWEET TEXAS GRAPEFRUIT!" might an unusually exuberant sign say.

I hate this shit! What, I ask you, what ever happened to the good old-fashioned white graperuit of my youth, uncrossed with any "mild" cousins, whose peel and pith was bitter, of course, but whose flesh was also bitter, and sour, to boot? Do modern citrus-eaters simply lack the gumption for an uncomplaisant fruit that doesn't flatter their unmanly tastes? Possibly, possibly! (This is what Plato meant, when he banned cookery from the city.) To these deniers of the dictum heretofore thought undeniable, to wit, that a spoonful of medicine helps the sugar go down, I have two chief suggestions:

1. Eat a fucking orange!
2. Eat a fucking pomelo!

Of course, the pink grapefruit cat is out of the bag, nor is the bag in the river, and so we can't say unreservedly that these people are simply both-ways-havers, who want to have the rights and privileges appertaining to the eating of a grapefruit, but the eating experience associated with different fruit altogether. I can, at least, offer the subsidiary suggestion that they at least lay off the white grapefruit (to which, after all, different associations attach than do to the pink, we having had time to recalibrate our customs) and, if they really want to eat one sweetly, they do so by putting some sugar on it. At least then their cravenness will be explicit. After all, why should they ruin it for the rest of us?

This sort of technological manipulation of the superficially "unpleasant" is all too characteristic of whatever political arrangement you happen to dislike (I gather that the neoliberal order is a popular choice among certain crowds these days, but "the modern age" has a certain timeless appeal, too). It is not insignificant in this regard that the grapefruit is the paradigmatic fruit that fights back, spitting its acidic poison no less inerrantly eyeward than do certain cobras.

Comments

[Stanley]

That the word for "grapefruit" in Spanish is pomelo, along with some internet googling, has lead me to the conclusion that there exists a difference between a pomelo and a pomelo. Most troubling, this.

[Ben Wolfson]

I have now had part of a pomelo and let me tell you: it was completely unremarkable and even boring. It did nothing for me. I am baffled.

[Otto von Bisquick]

Huh. I ate a pomelo last night. The be-all end-all of fruit? No. But boring and unremarkable? Hell no. It was tasty; sweet but not cloying. A fine fruit.

[Ben Wolfson]

Maybe yours was better than mine. Maybe I'm just a snot. It's hard to say, really.

[Lara]

perhaps my favorite thing yet written. I agree entirely.