In early September, The Washington Post featured an innocent public interest story about pawpaws, a fruit indigenous to the mid-Atlantic region that tastes like a fusion of bananas and mangoes and that some Washington-area residents happily forage for in their wooded communities.
Even this, in our activist age, elicited outrage from some readers. “I was shocked to hear that groups of people are hiking to collect pawpaw fruit,” wrote Washington resident Myriam Piers, who accused pawpaw foragers of greed. “Let us leave this ‘treat’ to opossums, foxes, squirrels, raccoons and birds,” she urged.
I’m no longer surprised by such absurd
