Food for Thought

Let’s get everything out in the open here. We’re friends, and as friends, we are not only entitled to being truthful with each other, we’re sort of obligated. So, I’m baring my soul to you in order to strengthen our bonds of friendship – either that or disgust you to the point of frantically dusting yourself off like a homecoming queen walking face-first into a giant spider web. Here we go:

I’m a pain in the ass when it comes to food.

Like any typical human, I have an attraction to being alive. Part of that equation is the consumption of food and drink. Not only is it a necessity, but, like sleep, it’s one of my favorite things in life. It’s right up there with reruns of The Simpsons.

I wasn’t always a fussy eater. When I was young, if you laid something marginally digestible within arm’s length of me, I was at least going to have an exploratory taste. I had no biases. Applesauce and pudding were just as likely to be on my menu as dog hair and pencil erasers. Then, one day, having discerned that, yep, I sure do love the taste of sugar, I decided to help myself to a titanic amount of it. So, I grabbed the container, tilted my head back, and proceeded to pour a heroic portion into my gullet. One problem – it wasn’t sugar. It was salt. I felt like I was on an episode of the 1960’s Batman series, with a voice-over saying, "What’s THIS?" I don’t remember much except getting violently sick at the foot of the stairs and making a mental note to not try this in the future. It was the first time food had been bad to me. I felt like I had been betrayed; however, there’s not much you can do to exact revenge on food. You can’t short-sheet broccoli, jump vanilla extract for a fight after school behind the Woodshop building, or give ice cream a wedgie. No, you just have to ball your fists and shake them at the sky like the hero of some great Nordic saga. Oh, and read the label next time.

Whereas my first negative rumble with food was an all-around disaster and loss for the home team, my second negative experience with food had a somewhat more satisfying conclusion. It was dinnertime, circa 1970-something. Mom, who has a black belt in cooking, made some sweet potatoes, or candied yams or some such thing. I don’t know the difference now and I certainly did not know the difference then. Anyway, the smell…well, have you ever smelled sweet potatoes? I mean really shoved your honker into the abyss and taken a good whiff of that stuff? Sewage! Raw, unprocessed sewage! It smells like the stink of a thousand middle school bathrooms. It smelled so foul that I almost lost my balance. Mom, ever the one to encourage us to try new culinary paths, told me to try some. Risking the violation of one of the Commandments, I emphatically declined. The more I declined, however, the more insistent she became. It became a battle of wills, and if common sense (i.e. avoiding being grounded) hadn’t prevailed, I’m confident that it would have become so violent that it would have made a monkey knife-fight look like a retirement party dance by comparison. I relented. So, I took what basically amounted to a gnat’s-weight of the stink on my fork and put it into my mouth. Imagine not only my surprise, but the surprise of everyone at the table when, about two seconds later, I vomited all over the kitchen table – you know, the kitchen table that, up until that time, sat my entire family happily enjoying their meals. And, oh no, this was no mere vomiting. This was projectile vomiting at its best. This was projectile vomiting that would have knocked Linda Blair down to the silver medal. I never did get to finish my dinner, and that was just fine by me. But, two inimitable universal truths were born that evening – when it comes to food, with me, no thank you means no thank you and mom never again forced me to eat anything I didn’t want. I went to bed triumphant.

Fast-forward more years than is your business, and I’ve compiled an impressive list of foods that I consider stable mates of sweet potatoes/yams. For the sake of brevity, I’ll give you my top three:

Onions – Onions are probably the most versatile of foods that I don’t particularly like. It’s the cooking staple of almost every Mediterranean cookbook. Open up to a recipe for homemade oatmeal and it will begin with, "Dice five fresh onions…" I cannot say exactly why I don’t like onions, but my best answer is the taste. I don’t like the taste. There are those who will say, "But onions don’t have any taste," but they’re fooling themselves. They most definitely have a taste – a bitter onion-y taste. Not only that, but the texture is aggressive and intrusive and it dominates the taste of everything else currently being shredded in my mouth. It’s the gunslinger of tastes that announces, "while I’m here, we’re gonna be doin’ things MY way. Anyone don’t like it can answer to me." Meanwhile, perfectly upstanding tastes like steak, chicken, rice, or whatever, cower behind the molars. Unfortunately, there are no tastes willing to play Gary Cooper. Now for the strange part: I love French onion soup. Maybe because there is no crisp texture to the onions or maybe because the taste is muted, but the fact I love it boggles my mind. Still, onions don’t get a pass for me liking French onion soup.
I don’t mind onion rings, either, and I have no explanation for that, either. I guess everything gets a pass when it’s deep-fried.

Mushrooms – Well, almost everything gets a pass when it’s deep-fried. Mushrooms wouldn’t get a pass even if they were the only source of food on earth. I guess I just don’t get it. Why would anyone, by his or her own volition, voluntarily consume a fungus – A FUNGUS! – that grows in manure? MANURE! A FUNGUS that grows in MANURE! Ever drive past a mushroom farm? You’d think they were exhuming bodies from a septic pipe. When the wind is right (can’t believe I’m using the word "right") in the morning, and a mushroom farm is within 30-40 miles of your location, you, too, can enjoy the sweet smell of animal turds, as thick as peanut butter soup, without having to go through the trouble of actually smashing your face into a steaming pile of animal poop. I don’t care if you wash them 100 times over or sand-blast the filth off of them – I’m not going near them. Besides, they’re a FUNGUS! We all eat mold, in some quantities, just by accident, but…well, I’ll leave it there. On the other hand, I have tried magic mushrooms once, and only once. A few things happened that I remember:

1. My voice sank about 10 octaves. I made James Earl Jones sound like Betty Boop.

2. I laughed constantly. I laughed so much that I was getting annoyed with myself. I was so annoyed at myself that I actually started to find it amusing. Of course, then I laughed some more.
3. My friend, Tim, and I went to a Phillies game at Veterans Stadium when the mushrooms began to kick in. We bought the cheapest tickets and sat in the upper deck. We had practically the entire upper level to ourselves. There, I decided to perform what I imagined to be the play-by-play of the immortal Philadelphia announcer, Harry Kalas. Tim probably wanted to throw me over the railing.

Peppers – Peppers just might be the most enigmatic of the top three. I don’t like peppers. Sweet peppers, hot peppers, Peppermint Patties, table pepper…I don’t like any of them (okay, I lied, I like Peppermint Patties. Taste the sensation). Again, it really begins and ends with the taste. Let’s get past the sweet peppers and just say that I don’t like the taste, but I’ll get back to that later. The hot peppers, however, well, jumping Jesus Jemima Junior, someone tell me the joy in eating something that has so much capsaicin (the "hot" element in hot peppers), that it’s the equivalent of eating broken glass. You know the people I’m talking about; we all know at least one person who prides him/herself on being able to eat food so hot it could light a cigar. These people make Charles Manson look like George Will. And yet, there was a summer in 1992 or 1993 where I suddenly became obsessed with peppers, and not just sweet peppers. I was downing hot peppers like crazy, too. I have no idea how this craze generated, but there I was, ordering every type of food with peppers on it. I was sailing along, nicely, perfectly at peace with my new gastronomic family of friends when I went to breakfast one morning at The Starboard Restaurant in Dewey Beach, Delaware. A woman was wheeling a cart with various peppers around the dining area (don’t ask) when I decided to strut my newfound pepper-eating bravado. "So, what’s the hottest pepper you have?" She showed me a habanera, or scotch bonnet, pepper but warned me that it was very hot. Tossing my head back theatrically and laughing at the warning from this mere human, I proceeded to pick up my prey by the stem and gently lowered towards my mouth. I bit the pepper in half and before my teeth were even 1/4th of the way into the bite, my brain was saying, "you are in big time trouble, son." I yelled loudly. By the time I had swallowed what I had bitten, I was in what can only be described as biblical agony. My eyes were gushing with water, so, of course, I did the sensible thing and wiped them dry…with my bare hands. Yes, my frighteningly capsaicin-drenched hands. More screaming and yelling. I actually walked out of the restaurant and back to my house, completely blinded because my eyes were swollen shut. I only lived a block away. But it took me a half hour to get home. I spent the rest of the day with ice cubes and wet wash rags on my eyes, laying on the couch and dying a thousand deaths. So endeth my dance with peppers.

Oh, there are still other foods out there that I cannot stand: almonds, pistachios, cashews, sunflower seeds, bleu cheese, feta cheese, goat cheese, peas, chickpeas, raw carrots, red cabbage, pine nuts, lima beans, oregano, garlic, cilantro, mint leaves, rosemary, capers, scallions, basil, and pretty much every type of food the typical American family serves for Thanksgiving (including the pies). I could go on, but, including the top three, that represents pretty much 95% of the foods I cannot stand and could happily live without.

Yes, that does mean I could live without onion rings.

Not so sure about the French onion soup, though.