A Parisian confectioner named Nicolas Appert won the prize by boiling jars packed with edibles and sealed with cork and wax. The food stayed fresh! Sacrebleu! Impressing Napoleon made Nicolas a wealthy man and one fat with hubris. He published a book in 1811, two years after inventing canning, called L'Art De Conserver, Pendant Plueieures Annes, Toutes Les Substances Animales et Vegetales. In other words, The Art of Conserving All Kinds Of Animal and Vegetable Substances For Several Years.
Call me crazy if that's not ripe for the New York Times Bestseller List. WORST TITLE EVER. But it became popular anyway, because canning was obviously a revolutionary technology. Napoleon's men were thus fortified by their Jar Du Niblets during their long, foolish, doomed haul into Russia in 1812.
In honor of Nicolas Appert and other advancements in food technology, I'm offering my own reward of 12 US dollars to whoever can provide me with a method of keeping pesky fruit flies the fuck out of my kitchen. Here are the rules. The solution must be (a) effective, (b) harmless to me, my cats, and my vegetable matter, and (c) aesthetically pleasing or neutral.
If no one can help me with this conundrum, I'll have to resort to big airtight RubberMaid bins, which violate principle (c) mentioned above, and possibly principle (b), if the lack of ventilation promotes fruit rot.
Good luck everybody, I know the stakes are high. Just keep your head screwed on tight as a lid over your pickled brains.
1 comment:
I have no solutions, currently, but I did some research and found that Rockefeller University's Leslie Vosshall believes that by castrating fruit flies of their ability to employ their most precious odorant receptor, Or83b, humankind can effectively rid itself of their presence in household kitchens.
I'm not a practising vegan (yet?) but I have a growing sense of liberal beliefs that likens the castrated fruit fly to a human made (genetically, of course, in a labratory) incapable of desiring (and thus imbibing) water. A most fundamental of impulses wiped clean by controlled genetic mutation.
The Hypocrite: I kill flies and small bugs all the time. Still, I'll enjoy the benefits of natural repellents over chemical killers anyway and can't help but wonder when, if ever, we as a people will recognize the genocide of small creatures (the fruit fly) as immoral.
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