Having suffered box-collapse more than once at the Fyshwick
markets, I now insist on a stout container for bearing away the week’s fruit and
vegetables. This week’s box was labelled as below. It was certainly
strong enough; it was designed to carry navels 12,000km across the
Pacific, aided by the following precautions:
Food-miles, organic purists, and destitute Mildurans apart,
my main point here concerns the label. The Blue Jay is a bird of eastern
North America. It was virtually unknown in California until its
relatively recent spread to the north of the state, making it, as Wikipedia
notes: ‘now a rare but regularly-seen winter visitor along the northern US and
southern Canada Pacific coast’. Its association with the east is shown by
the selection of it, from 4,000 entries in a ‘name the team’ competition, to be
the symbol of the Toronto Blue Jays when they secured their baseball franchise
in 1976. Its association with the orange groves of California is tenuous at
best. There are several other deserving resident Californian jays that
could have been chosen as a name for their oranges if they really needed a
(frankly irrelevant) bird for that purpose. Perhaps ‘California Scrub Jay
Oranges’ did not have quite the ring that the marketers were looking
for.
My irritation with the label arises from the suspicion that
the Blue Jay was chosen as a handsome bird with a pleasing and not unfamiliar
name that would encourage foreign consumers to try a few of the
freshness-enhanced Californian oranges. “They won’t know we don’t have any
Blue Jays in our orange groves”, they must have said to themselves. This,
in my view, shows contempt for bird-aware, orange-eating
Australians.
