Spare the Pears
My JtS blog posts have thus far been unified by one (and only one) theme: humor. Today’s topic, however, will depart from that tradition. I believe that it is incumbent on me, as a citizen of this nation, to shed light on one of the most egregious, yet seldom acknowledged, moral failings of our time: the horrific abuse of pyrus communis across this nation.
Pyrus communis, more commonly known as the “pear,” is a gentle creature native to West Asia, central and eastern Europe. Wild pears spend most of their youth in their leafy nests, and after they are large enough to leave their protection of their mother’s branches, they fall to the ground, spending most of their adult lives roaming the orchard in packs. Pears are intelligent, empathetic creatures—as they travel, the older pears encircle the adolescents, protecting them from predators. When a pear dies, its pack-mates carry it back to the base of its mother tree, where they lay the fallen pear to rest.
Prized for their tender flesh and voluptuous shape, pears are traditionally gifted around the holiday season. (They are also available year-round at supermarkets across the country for a fraction of the price.) The practice of gifting pears around Christmastime is nostalgic for many—myself included. Each year, I eagerly awaited the annual arrival of our Harry and David box, filled with Royal Riviera pears and, inevitably, a shitload of Moose Munch, the latter of which my mother frowned upon, as she for some reason was under the belief that bags of popcorn thickly coated with caramel and chocolate were “not healthy.” My fondest memory of this ritual is the year we received an entire tower of pears and Moose Munch, encased in festively-wrapped gift boxes stacked taller than I was at the time.
I never knew who the treats were from; they always arrived anonymously, with no card, and my father was always bewildered too. I knew that he was bewildered because each time they arrived, he would very conspicuously announce his bewilderment, loudly puzzling over it for a few minutes (“Do you think it could have been Uncle Tim?”) before concluding that it must have been Santa. Since, quite strangely, the arrival of the Harry and David boxes always caused a tiff between my parents (initiated by my mother and of a magnitude in direct proportion to the quantity of Moose Munch that year—the tower year was a real doozy), I have always been convinced that Santa had it out for my dad.
In any case, I have since learned the dark truth behind those boxes of foil-wrapped pears, and the time is ripe to share it with the world. Each year, Harry and David raises 15,500 tons of Royal Riviera pears for their flesh. Their lives begin when they hatch along with hundreds of other pears inside giant incubators. Only a few days after birth, the pears are crammed into shipping crates and sent to the factory farm, where they spend the rest of their youth in semi-darkness, confined to cages to prevent exercise. They will never meet their mothers.
On the farm, they are force-fed a high-calorie diet, so that they grow to be more than 10 times their normal size and become so engorged that they cannot move about freely. A recent exposé on this inhumane practice revealed that farmhands often treat the obese pears with extreme cruelty, prodding their swollen bellies and calling them demeaning names like “fatso” and “lard-face.” Under these barbarous conditions, the pears become depressed and angry, and fights among pears break out, causing them to develop unsightly blemishes and other cosmetic imperfections. Sadly, these damaged pears are usually killed and turned into puree, or skinned alive and drowned in vats of syrup at the cannery.
So, this holiday season, I am leading a movement to boycott Harry and David. The abuse and exploitation of Royal Rivieras must end—no longer can we turn a blind eye to the plight of the pears. I humbly ask that you stand with me in my quest to #SparethePears, and together, we can work to end this great and terrible evil.
I recognize that this is a big ask—after all, the sentimental association between pears and Christmas is so powerful that it has been enshrined in verse: In Andy Williams’ classic song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” a man gifts his lover a partridge in a pear tree on the first day of Christmas. Strangely, he does so again on each subsequent day of Christmas, and by the twelfth day of Christmas, the poor woman has a dozen partridges in a dozen pear trees, not to mention, by my count, 22 turtle doves, 22 pipers, 30 French hens, 30 lords, 36 calling birds, 36 dancers, 40 golden rings, 40 milkmaids, 56 geese, and 56 swans.
More concerning to me, by the way, than the imposition of a totally unreasonable quantity of strange gifts upon a non-consenting recipient (who would surely have preferred just one golden ring and none of the other nonsense) is the consequence that the poor innocent pears are left to the mercy of more than two hundred fucking birds,* creatures who, if you didn’t know, have sharp, nasty little beaks, oh, and, by the way, eat pears.
In any case, it’s a brutal song. But I suppose I would expect nothing less from a songwriter who once granted permission to use his song “Born Free” as the theme to Rush Limbaugh’s “The Animal Rights Update:” “Hey, it’s fine with me,” Williams (a known Republican) said, “I love what you’re doing with it.”
*12 partridges + 22 turtle doves + 30 French hens + 36 calling birds + 56 geese + 56 swans = 212 fucking birds
