10 Foods You Might Love and I Sure Don't

My buddy Lisa told me I ought to turn the last blog around and list ten food items that most people love and I don't care for. Mind you, in a world where so many people are hungry, I feel quite cavalier telling you about which foods will cause a sudden upturn in my nose, but I have made it a habit to do as Lisa asks. I've never gone wrong following her advice!

1. Pears - boy howdy does my darlin' Peggy love a pear. Yellow Bartlett, Red Bartlett, Green Anjou, Red Anjou, Bosc, Seckle: The pear growers of our nation name her to their Woman of the Year list year after year for her avid consumption of their fruit, which is oddly shaped, overly sweet, and gritty where the texture ought to be lush.
2. Sweetened cereals - Calvin in the comics used to love Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs in the morning, but who needs the rush? I know that most cereals have some sugar in them (so that we won't mistake Corn Flakes for Fritos, I suppose) but a little is enough. Take a walk down Kellogg Av in your local Try-'n'-Save, and you might get a buzz just from thinking about starting your day with a heaping big bowl of Dora the Explorer!
3. Anything with fake cherry flavor: because it winds up tasting like cough syrup.
4. Bologna and other tube lunch meats: now here is where I could save a bundle o' bucks if I wasn't so doggone picky. Lumped into the bologna tube genre are olive loaf, Bar-B-Cue loaf, Thuringer (summer sausage) and Old Fashioned Loaf, which is not going to make anyone yearn for the old fashioned days. I know that bologna is just a giant ungrilled hot dog, but I prefer a sandwich made with something whose parents had wings or hooves, not an extrusion tube.
5. Liver. In my youth I often spent time reading Reader's Digest, a great place from which to steal jokes, take vocabulary quizzes and read articles such as "I Am Joe's Liver (/Spleen / Duodenum / Left Testicle.)" In excruciating detail, these articles told about life from the viewpoint of a liver or spleen, whatever. I'm sure I remember reading that The function of the liver is to get rid of toxins from the blood. Crazy me, not wanting to dine on some cow's leftover toxins. (Please don't bother telling me harrowing facts about the diet of the blue crab.) I can say one good thing about liver, though. A friend of mine was teaching underprivileged kids in a Head Start program and they were balking at eating their federal lunches, because the kids were told they were having "Liver and onions today!" So the teacher told them they changed the selection to "Steak and onions" and the kids ate every morsel. See, it's that sort of brilliance re-naming and re-positioning that had Americans seeing GWB as presidential, and his war as justified and needed. Except, this switcheroo was good for kids.
6. Asparagus. Oh the hue and cry every spring when this perennial favorite shows up next to the ham on Easter dinner plates! Frenzied asparagus fans pack the produce sections of every store, vying for the chance to plunk down some hard-earned Jacksons for their favorite second-cousin-of broccoli. Like halvah merchants in old Morocco, the greengrocers lay out each stringy stalk lovingly and prepare to haggle over the price, which apparently is no object to the true believers. This stuff will always remind me of something down by the neighbor's fence that needs a good weed-whacking.
7. "Red" "Delicious" Apples: These maroon baseballs should find a new home in the bullpens of American ballparks as practice spheres. I love apples of the Granny Smith or Winesap taste and texture. The best apples, to me, are snappy and crisp, like a fall day, or a belt of hooch. Even the worms leave the Red Delicious alone for a few moments with Granny.
8. "Circus Peanuts" and "Fruit Slices": these things are to candy as liver is to meat, as cubism is to real art, as the Geico Cavemen are to sophisticated humor. Circus Peanuts are some sort of hardened marshmallow confection, formed in some giant candy press in Hell, and then dyed a pinkish color by some demented pixies. Fruit Slices, which you may rest assured have never been close enough to fruit to know the difference, are some sort of gooey colored sugar gumdrops. Those same demonic pixies, having finished making Circus Peanuts, then work an overtime shift and take their hammers to the gumdrops, forging them into the shapes of fruit slices. Then, freshman art students in need of quick holiday cash are hired to paint on fake fruit stripes and markings. This is all true.
9. Avocados and the greenish paste, guacamole, that is produced therefrom. It's tasteless and revolting in color and consistency, but, Homeowner Alert: It makes a handy Spackle for those pea-green walls that suddenly need repair from when you tried to hang up Big Mouth Billy Bass or a velvet painting of a leering clown, only to leave gaping holes because, well, like Britney Spears, you missed the stud.
10. Canned Fruit in HEAVY SYRUP: I have actually seen people walk past the fresh peaches on display in August in order to go down Aisle 5 and grab a can of Del Monte's finest Freestones in the big green can. Soaking in heavy syrup for a year or two certainly does little to enhance the taste of a peach, but here's another reason to avoid this stuff: I have it on good authority that The Man is sneaking cod liver oil, salt peter and spring tonic into the heavy syrup. And how about that Fruit Cocktail in H.S? What about that half a cherry that always winds up hiding in the seed pocket of half of one of the peaches? You want to trust your dessert to people who actually hire someone to stand there and cut cherries in half, rather than just giving you a doggone whole cherry? Fresh or canned? You make the call.

Next week: "13,258 Foods that you and I both love!"