Fruitcase (by NutcaseOM), open at a rakish angle, with avocado
The first time I saw a Banana Bunker, I thought it was the invention of the year. I wasn’t producing very much of art or utility at the time, so I missed its rather obvious design flaws—until the first time I tried to use it. That, I’m sure, was the idea once the Banana Bunker got out of prototype.
Bananas are not standardized, because Monsanto hasn’t bought the Banana Bunker patent yet: bananas are bendy or straight, and vary somewhat in dimensions. The Banana Bunker is too rigid to hold most bananas, and is instead a Banana Chastity Belt, causing as much harm to its contents as did that hoary puritanical garment.
To the chagrin of all urban bedouins, I still haven’t found an olive green solution for the banana transport quandary, but am closing on one. (Don’t look for it in stores because, as usual, it will be opensource and crappy-looking by the Factory-Fresh standards we’re drilled to venerate. It’s also not a trademark, but an OpenMarkOM, which is like Creative Commons with more indifference.) Anyway, an easier nut to crack has been an even more delicate comestible: the avocado.
Now that everyone in the Occident is concerned with “probiotics”—for millennia known elsewhere as “food”—it couldn’t be easier to find the materials for the Fruitcase (by NutcaseOM): Two matching yogurt cups and four standard rubber bands. Interloop bands as shown to form a figure 8, then loop them around the bases of both yogurt cups, with one inverted. The mouths of the cups will meet to provide a protective rib of plastic lip at the widest part of your avocado, the part most likely to be bruised. Given all the brands of yogurt vying for our guts and all the variations in their packaging shapes, you can surely design a Fruitcase (by NutcaseOM) for anything smaller than a grapefruit. See photos.
This solves two intractable problems: bruised fruit and the difficulty of recycling #5 (polypropylene) plastic, of which all yogurt cups I’ve seen are made. The only way to get rid of the damn things is at Whole Foods, where the Preserve Gimme 5 program will pick them up and make them into toothbrushes and razors. Splendid!—if you like to shop at national chains that throttle market diversity. Besides, I’m not driving 5 miles to drop off 550 yogurt cups. I’ll wait until they’re in the four-figure range.
Art of Olive Green 