Cashew Guilt

I can't begin to understand how the marketing of cashew nuts can be profitable.

They require special handling, their shells are filled with a caustic liquid and, most confusing of all, each cashew nut comes with the excess baggage of a piggybacking cashew apple.

My 99-cent bag of whole cashews from Walgreen's contains 50 nuts, more or less. If a bushel basket holds roughly 100 medium-sized apples, that means it's necessary to harvest and process the equivalent of a half-bushel of cashew apples to account for my measly snack-food purchase.

How does that work, economically? Do the cashew farmers earn two bucks a week? Seems like a lot of bother to go through just to keep cashews on the shelf at Walgreen's, if you ask me.

Figure in the discomforting knowledge of caustic liquids and painful skin rashes, and the pleasure of eating a handful of cashew nuts suddenly feels, well, wrong.

I've never felt morally conflicted about a pretzel.