Late in September, a forklift driver at a Kelowna apple packing house goes on a hunger strike for publicizing that a truckload of Washington Royal Gala apples was inside his warehouse during Royal Gala picking season. He was suspended for five days and then fired. His protest sign reads “BC Tree Fruits Took Away My Freedom Of Speech Please Support Our BC Farmers Do Not Buy U.S. Apples”. Let’s see if we can sort this out …

Royal Gala Apples Caught Crossing the US-Canadian Border

American clones of a red mutation of a New Zealand hot climate version of a British apple created from the cross between an ancient English apple and a popular seedling from New York, raised on Dutch grown root stocks from an English root stock selection program in the southern half of an arid fruit growing region in Western North America on water from British Columbia that was traded for industrial modernization in the 1960s, are being sold in place of identical clones from the northern half of the same arid fruit growing region by a formerly socialized marketing agency in a heavily capitalized food distribution system, comments on which have led to the firing of a fork lift driver, a brief flurry in the media, and then silence.

This is the kind of crazy thing that happens when a border (here and here) that is drawn in the middle of a country lets produce through (work) but not people (workers). The real map of the world, if it existed, wouldn’t illustrate the borders of countries but spheres of corporate influence. We live in Royal Gala.