No Accounting for Taste
"I like pineapple on my pizza."
Divide and Conquer?
I’m disappointed to see that the addition of succulent chunks of golden fruit mingling with complimentary tastes and textures atop a sizzling hot pizza could bring our nation to another crippling controversy. I guess we need to declare a new social taboo, another subject to be banned in polite company.
The opposing reactions to the Pineapple-on-Pizza issue have ignited a fourth divisive topic for Americans to either engage or avoid at family gatherings. One’s choice to add pineapple or not is no longer a matter of personal palate, but a call to battle, an avalanche of fall-on-your sword opinions that spawn insults, virulent teasing, needling, put-downs, shaming, and ghosting!
Zounds! You’d think we were debating one of the Big Three: Religion, Sex, or Politics
I was a fussy eater from the beginning. I would have been happy with Grape-nuts, grilled cheese sandwiches, and cherry pie for the rest of my life. Occasional normal fruit: apple, banana, orange. Hold the vegetables.
My mom was concerned and asked the pediatrician about it. Grape-nuts and grilled cheese sounded fine to him. The taste for vegetables would come later. And it did, a very short list: carrots and potatoes. But nothing green. Yech.
As a mature adult, it dawned on me that as a child, I never tasted any garden greens, raw or cooked. No blame, no shame. No garden. Dairy in the fridge, and a pantry full of cans. (I was grateful we had plenty food, considering the starving kids in China.)
As a mature adult, it dawned on me that as a child, I never tasted any garden greens, raw or cooked.
I was never inspired by farm-to-table creativity. I was embarrassed as a newlywed, and did the best I could from the “I Hate to Cook Cookbook.” This got the meals to the table and down the hatch, but I was always more comfortable with cleanup than cheffing.
I never liked pineapple as a kid, (never knew what a real one looked like) even though Mom made upside-down cake with syrupy cans of them. I felt a vague betrayal, a dirty trick going on, hidden in the folds of soul-less white flour and white sugar. A bitter duel between sweet and sour. It didn’t add up to ‘cake for dessert’ to me.
Eventually, as a mature adult, I flew to Kaua’i to explore the Garden Island and was surrounded by every kind of fruit in the world. I was initiated into Deliciousness there, and by the time I was introduced to Mr. Pineapple, I did not hesitate to partake. Fresh and ripe, a perfect natural blend of sweet and sour tartness! The juice swirled around my cheeks, splashing over taste buds more than once, like a Water Park of a pinball machine. Cowabonga!
Fresh and ripe, a perfect natural blend of sweet and sour tartness! The juice swirled around my cheeks, splashing over taste buds more than once, like a Water Park of a pinball machine. Cowabonga!
This experience was ecstatic, and later prompted a pattern of ordering pineapple as a pizza topping. But the Pineapple/Pizza issue today serves as just one of many socially fabricated differences: an inflated, exaggerated, and unnecessary problem among fellow beings. It’s silly.
As the Third Chinese Patriarch said long ago:
“The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. Make the slightest distinction however, and Heaven and Earth are set infinitely apart.”
I’m still not a good cook. But in those rare circumstances when it’s up to me to offer visitors a meal, I smile and say, “What kind of cereal would you like?”
Can’t imagine how I would have managed without the I Hate to Cook Cookbook!😄