Absurdity
Man Learns Bananas Have Been Quietly Composting His Groceries For Forty Years
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
A lifestyle post published this week by Boing Boing has informed a significant portion of the adult population that apples and bananas emit ethylene gas, a natural ripening hormone that has been quietly accelerating the decay of every vegetable, berry, and piece of cheese stored within several feet of them, for as long as those people have been buying groceries.
For many readers, this represents somewhere between thirty and fifty years of uninterrupted loss.
The article frames this information as a "life-changing cheat sheet," which is technically accurate. It is also the same energy as a doctor telling you the headache you have had since 1987 is because you have been sleeping directly on a car battery.
Ethylene gas is not new. Scientists identified it as a plant hormone in the 1930s. Commercial agriculture has used it for decades to ripen tomatoes in transit, which is why a supermarket tomato tastes like a stress ball someone left in a warm car. The information was available. It appeared in chemistry textbooks, cooking magazines, and at least one episode of a home economics class that roughly forty million Americans were present for and did not retain.
None of that stopped anyone from going home and putting a banana directly on top of their avocados for the next four decades.
Gwyneth Paltrow, who has built a company around the premise that basic wellness information is more valuable when packaged attractively, did not respond to a request for comment, but her website does sell a $42 ceramic fruit bowl described as "intentional" and "supportive of your produce journey," which in light of recent events appears to be doing no work whatsoever.
Denver resident Craig Holloway, 54, told a colleague Wednesday that he had read the article and was "pretty annoyed" by it.
"I must have thrown out ten thousand dollars of produce," Holloway said. "I thought I was just bad at groceries. Turns out I was storing a biological accelerant next to my spinach."
Holloway paused and then added that he is also bad at groceries, separately.
The article recommends storing ethylene-producing fruits away from ethylene-sensitive produce, keeping bananas isolated, and using airtight containers where possible. These are reasonable suggestions. They would have been equally reasonable in 1994, 1978, or at any point during the long unbroken stretch of time when this information existed and nobody was distributing it in an accessible format because the accessible format was a post on a website that also covers robot dogs and vintage synthesizers.
The Boing Boing piece includes a tip about wrapping the crown of a banana bunch in plastic wrap to slow the ripening process, a technique that has been in circulation since at least the mid-nineties and is currently being experienced by thousands of readers as a genuine revelation.
For context: the people reading this tip as a revelation are the same people who graduated from institutions of higher learning, operate motor vehicles, manage other human beings at work, and vote in consequential elections.
The banana, for its part, has offered no comment and will continue to emit gas regardless of what is stored near it, because it does not read lifestyle content and has no interest in your feelings about the matter.
Separate the fruit.
The story we are making fun of: https://boingboing.net/2026/09/19/fruit-vegetable-storage-cheat-sheet.html