7.16.2005

I got my ass kicked by a "Fruit Snack"

I thought I was pretty bright until I took the test. Fruit By The Foot snacks now have little quizzes printed on the paper in which the fruit is rolled. If you don't know exactly what Fruit By The Foot is, I'll explain. In the interest of general enlightenment, I'll let you in on the entire process so that you can make your own educated purchases. [DISCLAIMER] This account contains descriptions of the real-life treatment suffered by our friends, the fruits. If you are squeamish, please do not read.
Apples, oranges, pears, etc. are raised in small cramped quarters, sometimes as many as sixty per two-foot by two-foot cage. They have no room to spread their leaves. Often the larger fruits will bruise and even break the skin of smaller fruits leaving them all to eat, sleep, and mate in puddles of their own sugary juice. They endure these deplorable conditions until finally they are taken out of their prison and cruelly dispatched by inserting an electrode into their stem-hole. The lifeless flesh of the produce is then crushed to a pulp and mechanically flattened into long strips while the skins are used to make hats and day planners. I'm not sure how they get rolled up but I've seen midgets and firemen walking in and out of the factory hand-in-hand at all hours of the day and night. I've got a hunch that they have something to do with it. I wanted to show what the finished product looks like so that you could bear witness to the final horror. That is why I selflessly took 11.3 seconds out of my morning to do the Google image search for fruit by foot. Here is the result:

So I'll just describe them. They are flattened strips of fruit corpse about one inch wide and six feet long pressed to a piece of paper with the same dimensions and rolled into a tight little package.
As I said before, the paper is printed with little questions and answers to make you feel stupid. I hadn't noticed the freakin' college entrance exam written on the backs of these things until my niece, out of nowhere, asked me how fast a kid can run. I said, "Let's find out." and chased her around the yard with a lizard. Okay, so that part is a lie. I do that because I am a liar. What I really said was, "Oh, I guess it depends on the kid. About thirteen miles an hour I suppose. Why?" No answer, just another question. "How fast can an emu go?" At that point, I noticed she was looking at one of those Fruit By The Foot wrappers (Wouldn't it be cool if there were fruit by the foot rappers?) There was a list of organisms printed down the length of it. It seems the good folks down at the Fruit By The Foot factory, knowing exactly how fast each one can move, (smug bastards) were having a go at pushing around all of us poor souls who do not know the speed of an antelope compared to that of a cockroach. They even teased us with a list of speeds given in MPH from which we could choose and apply to each animal. You tell me, is it a bear that goes 38 MPH or a tortoise? What if you toss the tortoise off the top of a Ferris wheel? I'll bet that sucker's doing at least 38 MPH when it's 2 feet from the ground. See? Not so easy, is it?
The point is, we got 2 out of 8. How humiliating is that? That's 25% or, in the language of education, an F- - -. I'll bet those sadistic freaks implanted each pressed snack with a tiny microphone just so they can sit around the office and laugh at adults having long and spirited debates with little children about the running style of ferrets. Well, I fell for it. My niece and I talked over each animal with an unwarranted degree of seriousness and, in 6 out of 8 cases, screwed up. I hope that the guys down at the factory had a good laugh. They just better run if they see me coming at 'em with an electrode and/or a lizard.

1 Comments:

At 7/17/2005 8:15 PM, Blogger Amy said...

Eeesh, I guess I'm going to have to stop and think about the suffering of the fruit before I throw another box of fruit based kiddie snacks in the grocery cart. I'll say a prayer for their souls and then justify my perpetuation of fruit cruelty by reminding myself that my own sanity is saved everyday at three o'clock because of this senseless massacre.

As for the Mensa quiz on the wrapper? I'd write a letter to the fine folks at General Mills suggesting a handful of alternative topics: geometry theorems, algebra formulas, or perhaps a Bergen Evans vocabulary quiz.

 

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