Don’t Worry, Go Ahead and Eat That Apple

Hendrick Holtzius, 1616, "The Fall of Man." Note: Picture has been cropped to keep the cat.Album / National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

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I think we can all agree that good food manners are a good idea when you’re in a crowded, confined space like an airplane. Natalie Compton recommends, for example, that you not bring smelly foods like tuna sandwiches on board a flight.

Fine, I guess. But then there’s this:

Avoid: Eating “loud” foods

Before you start chomping into that perfectly crisp Fuji apple, consider the travelers with misophonia, a disorder that triggers physical and emotional responses to sounds like chewing, tapping and gum-snapping. But beyond them, the sound of gnawing on that fruit, or on corn nuts, or carrots, can be just plain obnoxious to everyone. Consider the auditory stimuli of eating your in-flight food, and avoid items that are noisier than most.

Seriously? We should avoid apples on the million-to-one chance that your seatmate happens to have a bizarre aversion to the sound of someone eating an apple? I’m surprised this leaves any food at all that can be eaten on airplanes. Pretty much any food is bound to have at least two or three people in the country who are triggered by its sound, smell, color, or Proust-like associations from youth.

I wouldn’t mention this except that it’s become entirely too common in daily life. We are endlessly being told that we should be sensitive about something we never thought twice about before, usually because there’s some small number of people who have serious reactions to it. Sometimes these people even invent pseudo-Greek names for their conditions even though there’s no known cause; it’s not listed in any diagnostic manual; and researchers make up out of thin air the claim that it’s quite common.

But life can’t be lived this way. We can’t go around avoiding anything that might trigger a reaction in a tiny number of people. Go ahead and eat that apple.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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