by Jamey Hecht
Picking out which of the limes in the grocer’s basket is the greenest, the ripest, the worthiest, you finish off the thousands of man-hours that went into making them all identical. Agribusiness has taken the three stages of planting, harvest, and distribution and added a fourth, the preliminary genetic erasure of every difference between the specimens. Mass-market produce is aimed at a faceless public of interchangeable consumers who have forgotten both the variety of imperfect nature and the possibility of living a unique life. You need to pretend that one of the limes is perceptibly better than the others, because those limes in the basket are eerily reminiscent of the milling crowd in the store: that greenest, ripest lime is you.
Jamey Hecht is a poet, a scholar, an actor, a journalist, a teacher and a perennial student. His book “Limousine, Midnight Blue” is available from Amazon. His website is jameyhecht.com and you can find his informative and entertaining blog at Poetry, Politics, Collapse. He will be reading at the PondWater Society July event on Saturday, the 10th with Ellyn Maybe and her band, at The Cobalt Cafe on September 28th and back here to do a solo feature at the November event.
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