Saving the World

I’m peeling a persimmon to make a salad. It’s a Fuyu persimmon, the kind you can eat when it’s hard, like an apple, unlike the Hachiya, which makes your mouth pucker if you try it before it’s turned to pudding. The skin of the Fuyu is tough, tougher than an apple’s.

My peeler hits one of those plastic stickers that are now attached to almost every piece of fruit in grocery bins. I scrape it off with my fingernail and place it next to another sticker, just removed from a banana, and the one from the kiwi. The one on the avocado is next. I decipher its message: “Avocado. Mexico.” This is so annoying!

Well, why don’t you just leave them on the peel, you might ask, they’ re tiny, no more than an inch in diameter.

Have you not heard of the great Pacific garbage patch,  I might reply. These mostly vinyl stickers can’t be recycled. They don’t break down into harmless substances. I have heard that they can pass intact through sewage treatment systems and float out into the mid-Pacific, together with bottles, cups and other plastic debris. I’m trying to be responsible. (Yes, I do hear the self-righteousness in my voice.)

But I had never checked whether what I had heard was actually true. So, after assembling my gorgeous multi-colored fruit and arugula salad, I called the San Francisco Department of Water, Power and Sewer. “They don’t degrade?”  I asked. “That’s right. They’re designated to go to landfills,” the voice at the other end of the phone line said.

Wherever they are tossed, with the banana peel into the compost bin, or detached, into the trash bin, some of these little nuisances eventually get into the ocean. But since I now can’t help but imagine that enormous floating island of plastic trash, I’ll continue to peel them off. While icebergs are melting, forests are burning, thousands are dying in wars and disasters, I’ll keep on peeling tiny bits of sticky vinyl off bananas, oranges, apples and persimmons, doing my bit not to add to the mess.