Now that the NYTimes op-ed page has become just another stop on the promotional circuit for authors of food books, I shouldn’t have been surprised that bananas were served forth. Not much of the fruit of the matter was a surprise to me because I had to review a predecessor of the latest tome seven or eight years ago (without consultation, some tight-assed gray ghost of a copy editor rewrote my lede [clumsily paraphrased here, since it has been seven or eight years]: “No one looks intelligent eating a banana. Imagine sustaining a whole book on the subject.”) And I have done at least one story on growers who specialize in “heirloom” bananas and so remain more worried about the extinction of polar bears. But I was amazed at the glib description of the apple as a fruit that is largely local and also at the throwaway at the end about “what other fruit can you slice over your cereal?” How about them apples? Or peaches, or strawberries, or apricots, or even mangos? Looking around at the mess on my desk, I can safely say you can look forward to contemplative pieces soon on fat, and Fairway, and maybe even “Sam the recipe guy’s just a bunch of recipes.”