This morning I laid in bed, eating a clementine - the small, easily peeled, seedless and orange-like fruit that comes in crates of a couple of dozen. I didn't feel too well so I was happy to get some Vitamin C in my system, hoping to ward off any illness. But my easy morning serving of fruit was interrupted by an unwanted seed that I bit down on hard about half way through my clementine. I was mad at that seed.
But this is just an example of how spoiled we are in our current food system. That I assume that a food won't have seeds in it, despite it being the natural course of reproduction?
Granted, the clementine is not the result of biotechnological engineering, but cross-breeding over 100 years ago between the mandarin orange and the sweet orange, but my assumption goes to show how much we are conditioned to see food as for our convenience, rather than having histories of its own - even supposedly "natural" foods.
This focus on convenience is one of those things I learned throughout my childhood. As the child of two working parents, school lunches were filled with the seemingly radioactive fruit roll ups and prepackaged crackers that came with ease, not with effort. I find, in my adult life, some of this focus on ease persists no matter how hard I try to reconstruct how I think of food. I somehow still like to eat things that come from a box.
Instead of fighting my own nature, I've started to buy things that come from a box more consciously. Brands like Annie's or other organic or good-for-you prepackaged or frozen food. I think to make these good food trends stick, we have to make some of them easy.
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