The Avocado Affair
On how popular culture can easily be perceived as “the truth”
On an uncharacteristically warm evening in December I was chatting with my friend & colleague Barna about some articles to write on aPage, and among the topics of conversation we stopped upon an issue that is very dear to me: avocados! This yummy ingredient can be found in Romania almost everywhere but always green and hard as a rock. So a major problem I face is how to get these avocados ripe, ideally as quick as possible. Barna shared with me what seemed to be the ultimate solution > getting the avocado ripe within six hours by using something, which he confessed was sure to work! The secret: put an avocado within a pile of bananas and magic will occur.
At that moment, for a few minutes, Barna seemed to me like an enlightened guru that had offered the magic solution I had be looking for! However skeptical me kicked in and decided to research first and admire later, so I went ahead and tested Barna’s story. The skeptic won over to the believer when Barna’s magic solution proved to be wrong: placing an avocado within a pile of bananas does not ensure a ripe fruit!
Real Life Situations:
This avocado affair has raised a larger issue which I am intrigued about: how easily we take elements of popular culture for real world facts. One of the projects I work on at Asociatia ORICUM – Cluburile de Film One World (CFOW)– is about dealing with this issue: how easily young people tend to believe things they see & hear. At CFOW we talk about human rights and we invite young people to watch documentaries about issues ranging form women’s rights, the environment, multiculturalism and so on.
Over the years it has served as a very good case study on how young people in Romania interact with an element of popular culture (the documentary film) and how easily they believe that what they see is reality or the truth. Obviously a documentary film is about real life facts and it’s quite easy to become sympathetic to the cause that it presents, but documentaries are subjective just like anything else, it is not the truth, it’s merely an opinion (sometimes well informed other times not so much).
How do you create the spirit of inquisitives and kick start the ability of people to question things they see and hear. How do you go from: “that looks so true” to having an attitude more like: “let me check that with other sources and get back to you”. I discovered that the majority of the young people we interacted with at CFOW tend to be puzzled when we invite them to question what they see, it’s simply not in their radar. Especially when talking about something which is not in the immediate proximity of their everyday life. One rather small but important solution is to create an infrastructure that enables media education which has at it’s core critical thinking. Once the ball of critical thinking get’s rolling the avocados might start to get ripe, really fast!
The young people we are working with will become adults and hopefully they will remember the importance of asking questions about the things they see and hear. The majority of those around them will however be easy victims of popular culture and the task of getting those to be more skeptical is quite daunting but not impossible.
The avocado affair showed me that it’s not so complicated to unmask popular culture. It’s a question of perseverance! What did I do after Barna shared he’s magic solution? I put the idea to the test by planting an avocado next to some bananas and came back 24h later. Sadly for Barna, his magic solution was nothing more but a mere piece of untrue popular culture.
Later edit: popular culture strikes back on this issue, so many people before me and Barna seem to have had this discussion about avocados and how to ripen them – the internet is flush with so much info on the subject… I spend a good hour trying to figure out.
The Avocado Association of Australia seems to have the simplest and best methods: http://www.avocado.org.au/howto/ripen.aspx
reading this, i remembered when i was an Exchange Student in the U.S. some twelve years ago, we had a peculiar class: World Issues.
it was exactly that, a class where we discussed whatever was going on out there. not surprising, on a daily basis and totally tirelessly the world has had some huge issues it was facing, and we had our issues with the world (in our teenage years, you bet), so you can imagine the fun.
the class had a very simple formula: we were watching the news on big TV, and picking up a newspaper or magazine or two – Time, Fortune, BusinessWeek, US News and World Report and the likes – and were asked to picked one article/subject to react to and talk to class about.
little pure academia, lots of relaxed debate which frequently grew into the hottest of debates, over a series of classes.
most importantly, in the most unobtrusive manner it was teaching us to keep our ear out, question and doubt, and – to use your metaphor – “ripe” our worldview. somewhat similar to your guys’ CFOW effect. i say you keep the good work up, we need it for “the crops”.
loved the writing and how you constructed ya point!
now, “How do you create the spirit of inquisitives and kick start the ability of people to question things they see and hear.” —> ideally, as a parent, you teach kids to question everything, including your own bullshit. If you’re willing to do this, future is bright. If not, each nite show him a George Carlin video, it will eventually lead to the same ‘question all’ attitude.
As for the avocado, I have 2 pieces of it but didn’t do anything with them. What’s the best veggies to mix them with?