Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is heartwarming, like the Taco Bell customer who ordered on the app at the drive-thru; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the woman who was mocked online for buying lemons at the grocery store.
When she has a lemon tree.
Look, this story has a great, viral hook. It’s basically a punchline, and it’s interesting, and it’s funny… but it’s also incredibly relatable.
To wit: I asked the Trending editors about their childhood experiences with fruit and they all had a great, evocative story. Eilish’s grandmother lived near a grapefruit farm in South Texas and to this day she has a fondness for the tart fruit. Laiken grew up with inedible berries that she remembers vividly smashing into the concrete. Sabine grew up near mangoes in southern Florida. For me, it was my grandfather’s fig tree. I didn’t know what a fig was but he’d teach me how to peel and eat them.
A friend who recently moved to Austin, Texas asked me if we had fruit stands. Everywhere in the world, people harvest fruit and sell it fresh. In Texas not so much, basically just in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, I replied.
It seems we’re all pining for not just fresh ingredients but the simple and deceptively well-organized commerce of yesteryear these days. That’s why we get so dang upset at the self-checkout.
So the viral news story we published is about the dystopian absurdity of not harvesting your own lemons when you have a tree and the resources to maintain it in your yard. The creator was 28 years old, clearly a competent and successful adult, but her confusion landed as indicative of young people being out of touch with the land. She apparently didn’t know it was possible and legal to pick, wash, and consume her lemons.
But this story has a happy ending. In an interview with the Daily Dot, Cronin said she discovered avocado and orange trees on her property and planned to start picking fruit from them.
“I’ve read a lot in the past few days [and] joined so many conversations about why so many people do hesitate to eat straight from trees and bushes, which is a larger number than you’d think!” Cronin told us.
