Well it looks like the days of the squeezers and thumpers are numbered. You’ve seen them of course in Mr A’s local emporium manhandling the fruit and vegetables without a care in the world. They are totally unconcerned by any threat of retribution as they pick up the fruit piece by piece and concentrating all their strength into one fist, squeeze it as forcefully as they can. Now at this point there are only two possible outcomes,either the fruit is too hard,in which case it is discarded,or it is too soft,in which case it is also discarded as damaged. Having established that there may in fact be some ripe specimens they then continue and apply slightly less force. All this is fine when you catch them in the act of “fruit rage” because you can also skirt around the manhandled items and try to beat them to the good stuff but don’t forget that previous squeezers and thumpers have been at it the whole bloody day and if you have the misfortune of arriving late in the afternoon you run the risk of being enveloped in a swamp of fruit puree. Help however is at hand. A University of Arizona professor has invented a sticker that can tell consumers if a fruit or vegetable is ripe. A marker on the sticker detects a chemical called ethylene gas which is released by fruit or vegetables as they ripen and the sticker turns from white to blue. Bloody marvelous I say, especially since all those nice old men in white jackets who could tell you, in their funny accents, just which avocados were ripe, simply by looking at them, seem to be disappearing. Mr A of course could tell you but you can’t expect him to be everywhere now can you?
0 comments:
Post a Comment