Dear Mr. Reese

Among folks of a certain ilk, the banana is held up as a paragon of intelligent design. Look at how well it fits in your hand, they say; look at this fruit that comes in it’s own convenient easy-peel packaging; look at this fruit that barely has seeds; look, it even tells you it’s best-before date by the number of freckles it’s got! All these folks are wrong. How do I know this? Because I have just partaken in some of your fine fruits, and all I have to say is:

Checkmate, Atheists.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I purchased your fine “Reese’s Potato Chips Big Cup King Size…” Wait. Now that I look closely at the packaging, I see that this fruit doesn’t actually have a name? Only a series of wildly mismatched adjectives? Have we as a society gotten to a point where even God’s Perfect Fruit doesn’t need a name? Do we just see a bright orange package with an Italic font and say “ah yes, peanut butter and chocolate goodness, sign me up?” What does this say about us as a nation? But I digress.

Anyway.

For the longest time, the only way we poor US based consumers could get our hands on God’s Perfect Fruit From God’s Perfect Tree was to eat the old, debased version you used to sell us, the creamy peanut butter endocarp housed in the chocolate mesocarp, with no seeds, no pith, and only a thin, papery epicarp that peels so easily away – and we liked it just fine, mind you! Occasionally the botanists at your super secret developmental farms (or perhaps that’s you!) would develop a new cultivar of the tree, such as reesus peanutbutterus chocolata var miniata, whose fruits would come ripe only around such festive days as Christmas, or Easter, or Halloween; and then oh how we would rejoice as we got to try new varieties of your delicious fruits.

But now! Now, as a connoisseur of all things that grow on trees, I was able to try something new! I suppose the slow food movement, or the local food movement, or maybe just American consumers’ constant search for novelty, means that you have brought us back an older, heirloom variety of r. peanutbutterus chocolata - a larger fruit, and one whose peanut buttery flesh is studded with tiny seeds! Oh how I marveled as I bit into the first of the two fruits in the package to find that its tiny seeds crunched pleasingly between my molars, providing a bit of texture to what might otherwise be an insipid, monotone bite. The first bite was magical, but as I kept eating the fruit, I found myself getting bored with it, I found myself getting annoyed at the plating of the seeds on my molars, I found myself wondering who would have thought this was an improvement over God’s Perfect Fruit, the commonly available peanut butter cup?

So I began to wonder - what if it’s something more sinister than just the search for novelty? I did notice that the seeds are salty - we all know that overirrigation of farmland is causing desertification and soil salinization… is that what’s going on here, Mr. Reese? Did you notice that the yields of your more normal fruit trees were dropping, and were you forced to channel your inner Nikolai Vavilov and go hunting for wild ancestors and relatives of the r. peanutbutterus to crossbreed to try to develop a new version of the tree that could live, thrive, and produce in saltier soils?

Or was it something worse, even? Are the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups we know and love under threat of a phylloxera, a banana wilt? Are the old, “plain” peanut butter cups we all grew up with going to go the way of the Gros Michel banana, and are we going to be stuck with Potato Chips Big Cup King Sizes forever, much in the same way we’re also stuck with the supposedly far less tasty Cavendish banana, now that the Gros Michel has been driven mostly extinct by man’s oldest enemy, man’s oldest friend, a fungus?

Are you simply getting us used to a seeded version of this fruit because you know something that we don’t? Is a day coming when we will be forced to eat only seeded varieties, and you’re trying to convince us to consume a suboptimal version of the fruit because you know that Reese’s Crown Gall Blight is coming in only a few short years, and your marketing needs to get ahead of the disease?

Whatever the case may be: this time, you’ve made a mistake, Mr. Reese. I am an amateur horticulturist, and I only ate one of the two fruits from the package. What did I do with the second, you ask? It’s in soil in a pot in my driveway, being watered with karrikin- and nutrient-rich water, and soon I know I’ll have my very own r. peanutbutterus trees sprouting. No no - don’t call your friend Mr. Monsanto and have him send his goons over to collect me. I know you think I might be easily trackable, since I put a “return address” on this envelope - but how do you know that’s real? Sure, these seeds might not breed true… but once I have a seed stock, I too will be able to start breeding my own versions of these trees. And one day they will flower, and then they will fruit.

And on that fine day it will be my turn to say: Checkmate, Atheists.

Sincerely,

Alex Parise