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drawing skills alive. The book’s unexpected success, along with the collective and multitudinous shafting from the entire scientific community, persuaded her to drop her groundbreaking work in the sciences. In 1997, the Linnean Society publicly apologized for its treatment of her. Perhaps they owe the rest of the world an apology too: Because Fleming didn’t “discover” penicillin until 1928 (see page 103), a full thirty years after Potter first identified it. If Potter’s work hadn’t been rejected, countless lives would have been saved. On the other hand, the world would have been denied the soothing balm of Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail. And, really, when you lay it all in the balance, which is the more effective antibiotic?

Penicillin? Fair enough. Just trying to make a point.

THE AWFUL TRUTH BEHIND FIVE ITEMS ON YOUR GROCERY LIST

HEY, that banana you’re eating? It probably killed somebody! Well, sort of. Bananas don’t kill people; people kill people . . . over bananas. And soda. And a bunch of other stuff you buy at the food store. For example:

5. CHIQUITA BANANAS

In 1975, Chiquita president Eli Black left the company by leaping out the window of his forty-fourth-floor office in the Pan Am Building in New York. His replacement, upon taking the reins, was quoted as saying, “It’s important that I don’t get too knowledgeable about the past.”

What’s this “past” he didn’t want to think about? Well, there was the massacre of striking Colombian workers the company allegedly ordered in the twenties. But that was almost fifty years before. He was likely worried about more recent atrocities, like the CIA coup they’d orchestrated in the fifties. Yep, a freaking CIA coup. Orchestrated by a banana company.

The idea gets a lot less ridiculous, and way more depressing, when you know a few things: The head of the CIA in 1951, Allen Dulles, had been on the board of trustees of the United Fruit Company, which is what Chiquita was called in 1951. Around this time, Guatemala elected Jacobo Árbenz to the presidency, and Árbenz made the mistake of thinking that meant a damn thing. His plan was to purchase a small portion of United Fruit’s land and distribute it to poor Guatemalan peasants.

When Árbenz hesitated to pay the company $16 million (its own internal documents valued the land at half a million), United Fruit decided this was a reasonable point in the negotiation process to ask the CIA to intervene. And goddamn did they intervene, replacing the freely elected Árbenz with a right-wing dictator and starting a goddamned civil war. Guatemala’s brief flirtation with democracy and prosperity was over, but, hey, it’s not all bad. The civil war that resulted from the coup eventually ended. In 1996.

4. NESTLÉ QUIK

For any youngster who cringes at the thought of having to choke down a glass of plain milk with dinner, Nestlé Quik is a little box of magic. One tablespoon of the powdery goodness can transform that glass of white nasty into a delectable cup of chocolaty awesome. Add to this the fact that every box is emblazoned with an adorable cartoon rabbit, and what you have is a certified childhood dream maker.

At least that’s true for most kids—lazy, shiftless bastards that they are. Some kids, on the other hand, have to work for their Nestlé Quik. The majority of the world’s cocoa supply comes from Africa’s Ivory Coast, where child labor, trafficking, and (oh dear) slavery are not uncommon. But, hey, there’s no way a corporation with such an adorable mascot would let that shit go down on its watch, right?

Well, after years of flying under the atrocity radar, word of the unspeakably harsh conditions on Ivory Coast cocoa plantations finally came out in 2001. In the face of an influx of negative publicity, Nestlé valiantly leapt into inaction. After issuing public statements claiming it had no way of knowing who did what, where, or when, the company was finally forced to acknowledge the problem by an agricultural bill that would have created a federal system to certify and label chocolate products as “slave free.”