American priorities have always been warped. At some point I came to terms with the rich: I'm inured to the fact that billionaires are drinking champagne while toothless grandmas are dumpster-diving for their next meal. Once we introduce pets to the equation, though, it starts to irritate me. New York dogs, for instance, have better wardrobes than high school students in Africa.

Yes, even the ones wearing Juicy Couture Pour la Pooch.

Well, today the Observer's Very Short List newsletter gives us irritation squared. This little newsletter has always been a celebration of the trivial, every day blaring discovery of the hottest new film, song, or pomegranate-green tea muffin that's ever been created by mankind. Every day they draw some artsy Venn diagram that allegedly illustrates something but instead makes USA Today's bar graphs look like Nobel-quality work.


Today, they gush over a website/book of images called Inside Insides. I'll let them explain it.

Magnetic resonance imaging uses a strong magnetic field to give high-contrast images of the internal workings of water-filled things, such as knee joints, brains and, well, vegetables. The fruity MRIs on this site show a moving cross section of the fruit, producing images of vaguely familiar food shapes repetitively blossoming and oozing in gray tones. Though nothing revealed by these scans is all that surprising (we’ve all seen the insides of an eggplant), the format of the imaging takes advantage of the weird symmetries in plants and fungi to make beautiful, dreamlike patterns—the mushrooms pulse like jellyfish; the cabbage expands like a controlled explosion; and the celery spins like a fractal—thus proving technology can make even a salad exciting.

Got that? That spur your interest at all? Me, not so much. Mostly I find myself getting irritated that fruits and vegetables are getting health care that 80% of Americans can't afford.

I'm kind of angry that rutabaga stands a better chance of getting a checkup than the guy who picked it.

And I'm totally pissed off that some bored, overprivileged idiot is sending broccoli through a technological marvel invented to detect human disease when, you know, odds are there's no undetected brain tumor in its stalk that'll make it leave its little brussel sprouts prematurely.

News flash, dude: this million dollar machine wasn't created so somebody could say, "Oh, cool! Look at this photo of celery!" Or "Man, that cauliflower rocks!" If you've got access to an MRI machine and nothing to do, here's an idea. Walk outside and find the first non-white you can find. Odds are this person doesn't have health insurance. Ask them if they want a quick checkup. For free. Just to be nice.

If instead you head to the kitchen and think, Gosh, I wonder what an kumquat looks like on the inside, you're a full-fledged idiot.