In the latest mini-episode of the Substandard—to which you should subscribe and for which you should leave a review (five stars, please)—JVL wanted to talk about pumpkin spice. So we did. But he also suggested that "grapefruit" is the official flavor of summer. This is, of course, nonsense. It does give me an excuse, however, to talk about one of my all time favorite unnecessary inventions: the double-bladed grapefruit knife. After the embed, let's talk about this for a moment, shall we?
So, the proper way to eat a grapefruit is to cut it in half, separate the sections of fruit from the membrane of the peel, and then douse the grapefruit with highly processed sugar in an effort to make what is an objectively foul-tasting fruit somewhat edible. But how does one properly separate the little sections of fruit?
With a double-bladed knife, of course.
The two blades allow you to seamless slice the fruit from its retaining wall (or whatever that little membrane is called) in one motion rather than having to cut twice. It's a 50 percent reduction in labor! It's so amazingly specific that I am totally fascinated it exists at all. I assume the inventor was some overworked sous chef driven insane by the Sunday brunch set. Or does it date back further than that? Did the chefs working for French nobles have a double-bladed grapefruit knife before being bundled off to the guillotine?
Now look: Maybe I'm just easily impressed. Maybe it's no big deal that there's a two-bladed knife designed to make a disgusting fruit no one could possibly like edible in a quicker fashion. But by God, if the double-bladed grapefruit knife isn't proof of the greatness of human ingenuity, I don't know what is.