This Food Tastes Like Crap

The ginkgo tree is a tall, hardy tree of Chinese origin.  It has been around, stinking up the environment, for over 250 million years.  We have abundant fossils from the Permian epoch of the Paleozoic era, all showing the distinctive fan shaped leaves of the ginkgo.  

            The ginkgo’s wrinkled, coral colored, fruit smells like vomit or dog poop (there’s a pleasant choice!), the interior seeds, however, are described as tasting just as good as edamame!  My contention is that the step from vomit to edamame is a small one.  I don’t care how popular these boiled-in-the-pod soybeans are, they taste like crap.  They are popular only if you are opposed to any food that contains calories, fat, carbohydrates or good taste.  They are also popular among those faddists in the community who are sure that eating something obscure makes you an epicure.

            These are the same gustatory snobs who think that the world’s most expensive coffee bean, Kopi Luwak, is a treat.  These beans are, “harvested” from the feces of the palm civet—a cat like creature from Southeast Asia!  If you pay top dollar to drink this stuff, I would ask you to read, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” because you, sir, have been pathetically duped.

            The smell of the ginkgo fruit is reminiscent of the Titan Arum plant of Sumatra.  This 8 feet tall plant blooms maybe once in a decade.  The fact that it is also called the, “corpse” plant gives you a clue as to what it smells like.  The umbrella shaped leaves open out to a 3-4 foot diameter and fill the air with the odor of rotting flesh.  This stench rapidly attracts the usual array of flies, beetle, and other insects which are needed to pollinate the foul smelling plant. 

We are lucky no one is trying to tell us that the corpse plant, like those nasty ginkgo seeds, is as good as squash blossom soup!  Never mind that there are toxins inherent in ginkgo seeds which can build up to the point of toxicity, destroy vitamin B6 in the body and are particularly dangerous to children.  There will always be some anorexic-thin, gym junkies, with no degree in science, telling us that this crap is good for us. 

Do you know what is good for us?  Bacon!  I once saw a picture of Van Gogh’s painting, “Starry Night” done all in bacon!  Now that was a good picture!  The only difficult part of looking at that photo was deciding where I would start eating, once the whole think had been put in a hot oven for about 40 minutes.  It isn’t like a chocolate bunny where the point of attack is always the ears; Starry Night has no obvious areas of weakness.  The fact is that any recipe that starts with, “brown up a pound of bacon” is a good recipe; and any food that tastes like edamame is crap.

A little fat, salt, sugar or carbohydrate is not going to kill us.  It is immoderation that will kill us.  And that means immoderation in food and exercise fads as well as what we eat and drink.  I don’t eat tuna and a dill pickle for lunch because I like it, but I refuse to go through life without whole milk, real butter, and an occasional bowl of ice cream.  I exercise daily, drink in moderation and won’t smoke or take drugs, but I will eat a plate of bacon before I’ll eat edamame, plain, salted or vomit flavored. 

Try a little common sense, and keep the faith.