The Human Misting Project
I’ve been traveling this week for work and stayed in a hotel. The hotel’s shower was decent, featuring a tiled floor and glass enclosure. The water pressure was comfortable and the temperature pleasingly warm. Overall, the hotel’s shower experience received passing grades.
I say all this because, in going to the grocery store, there’s allusions to our own showering lifestyles, and it resides with the produce. In the current century, almost every grocery store’s fruits and vegetables sections include automatic misting, scheduled tiny showers for the produce to keep them from drying out. And we celebrate this little shower today on National Produce Misting Day.
I’m sitting at the airport waiting for my return flight to board as I write. I’m imagining how our travel life would be impacted were we as pampered as grocery store produce. Imagine, for a moment, if we were misted over with warm water as we waited.
Here at the airport, for example, we might be lightly sprayed with warm water as we listlessly wait. Of course, this wouldn’t be as simple as taking a shower, and I’m far from claiming that we should all disrobe at the airport—although it might make security screening quicker. But, say, we might all be outfitted with temperature responsive wetsuites and then misted every so often as we wait. It seems a refreshing way to while away the time and wash away our waiting fatigue. We’d be as happy as peas in a misted wetsuit pod.
Obviously, this will never happen though. The construction and deployment would be insane and, on top of it all, I doubt anyone actually desires regulated airport misting. But I’d give it a try were an airport to set it all up. And heck, this really has nothing to do with airports.
So, were we to simply set up a patchwork of misting stations around the country, I know I’d visit. These wouldn’t be public bathe houses. They’d be public misting stations, places where we can rest and catch up with one another. They’d be our new cafes or rec centers, the new third place where we’d finally break free from the extended stay within our Covid shells.
Join me on this mission—the human misting project—and lets all be like produce together.
Happy National Produce Misting Day!