Guest Terrible Tuesday post by no other than dennisf. This is the first of a regular post. Not sure we can top this, but we will try. If you have a food hate, please share, we love to hate with you.
Liking things is easy. It takes no effort or imagination to decide to have positive feelings about something. It’s the easy choice, the lazy choice.
This is especially true of foods. If someone asks you try a food that you’ve never had before, say rocky mountain oysters or pate or Lunchables, the easy thing to do is to take a small bite, nod ambiguously and say something along the lines of, Huh, that’s pretty good, or, Yeah, that’s edible. (The southern version of this would be: It’s aiight.) After that, whomever offered you said victuals will likely not bother you about it again. This person will feel satisfied that she has introduced you to a new food, assume it will become a part of your diet and will likely tell mutual acquaintances at a dinner party sometime soon that she was the one who introduced you to said food.
The more difficult path is hate. It’s difficult for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that your mom has been telling you since you were three years old that hate is not a word that we use in this house and if you want to hate you better take it somewhere else. Your mother, of course, is correct. Hate is an ugly, vile word. It conveys a highly specific feeling and it leaves no room for interpretation. If you tell someone you hate her, it’s pretty clear you won’t be inviting her over to eat fried Oreos and watch “The Real Housewives of Dorchester”.
(The inverse of this of course is the way that we use the word love. Everyone loves everything. You love “Footloose” [the original, obviously]. You love Cap’n Crunch. You totally love your college roommate, who you’ve known for, like, ever. And you love Sunday mornings because you get to sleep off the seven mojitos and go to brunch and have a bloody mary and eat chocolate pancakes and bacon and then go watch football and maybe have a couple of beers and then take a nap and maybe wake up in time to make some microwave burritos for a snack and then take a shower at like 8 pm and then watch the late game and pass out by halftime.)
But hate also is hard because it takes effort. You have to have a reason to hate. You can’t just say, I hate the Beatles, and not have a reason. You have to be able to back that up with clear and specific supporting rationales. In the case of the Beatles, that would be because their music is either cloyingly trite or ponderously self-important. Unless you’re me (or Fatman), you don’t just go around throwing the word hate at things. Hate takes work.
And that brings us to food hate. Food hate obviously isn’t the same as hate hate. Hate hate involves people and usually some sort of grievous emotional or physical injury inflicted upon you by these people. Food hate is more like sports hate in that it’s way more important than real hate. Yankees fans like me talk all the time about how much we hate the Red Sox, when the truth is we’ve never met any of them and are unlikely to at any point. Even if we did meet someone like, say, Dustin Pedroia, we’d probably mumble something about what a gritty player he is and shuffle off. What we really mean when we say we hate another team is that we hate the idea of that team, what that team and its fan base represent to us. In the case of the Red Sox, this would be mouth-breathing dopes wearing t-shirts that say “Boston, Drink Beer and Fight”.
For me, food hate is even more powerful than sports hate. I’ve been a Yankees fan for more than 30 years and I’d like nothing better than to see Fenway Park sink into the swampland of the Fens while fully occupied by the team and 40,000 of its pink-hatted fans. Hate. However, I’ve probably seen something like 40 games there over the years. My love of baseball usually outweighs my hate for the particular team playing it at that moment.
The food equivalent of the Red Sox for me is probably something like pork chops. I really, really hate pork chops. As a kid, I’d chew them up into small bits and then spit them into my glass of milk while pretending to drink in order to avoid swallowing them. They make me shiver whenever I see the words on a menu. But now, if I was hungry enough, or stuck at a formal dinner with Tommy Hilfiger, Rebecca Romijn and Tyra Banks (this happened) and had no other option, I could almost certainly choke down a few bites. And I probably wouldn’t vomit.
But, if I was at the same dinner, or another one with, say, Keira Knightley, Heidi Klum and Lionel Ritchie, and they served an awesome dinner of Five Guys burgers, wings from Buff’s Pub, bacon-cheese fries from the Shade Tree and cupcakes made by my wife, and for some reason there was a small dish of mayonnaise at the other end of the table that most humans would never notice, well, I’d have to leave the table. And I probably wouldn’t make any polite excuses. I’d just run out the door and try not to pass out before I found somewhere to sit down.
Mayo just makes no sense to me. It’s beyond foul. Just writing the word mayonnaise on this page is making me dizzy and nauseated. This is how the all-knowing Wikipedia defines mayonnaise: “a stable emulsion of oil, egg yolk and either vinegar or lemon juice.” Fuck that. I am not in the habit of eating emulsions of any kind, stable or otherwise.
Why does this substance exist? I assume that someone somewhere (almost certainly France) found some eggs that had been sitting out in the sun for a while and, not wanting to waste them, mixed them up with some oil and other crap and used it as a way to cover up the taste of whatever spolied meat they had scavenged from the roadside. In that context, it makes some sort of sense. You’d likely be too busy gagging on the mayo to realize that you were going to be experiencing “Bridesmaids”-level GI distress in a couple of hours from the vermin-infested meat. That’s the only plausible explanation.
Does this sound like something that members of a supposedly evolved species should be slathering on their food? No, no it doesn’t. And so I urge all of you to stand with me against the tyranny of this vile condiment and start telling your friends and family and waitrons that you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore.
If they bring you a plate with mayo on it, send it back. If they cover your burger with it, walk out. If they offer it to you as a dip for your fries, punch them in the neck.
Or just say no, thanks. Whichever. Here endeth the lesson.
ktebcdog
