A friend, just back from a trip to Los Angeles, was telling me about a little shop she stopped at that sold soybean ice cream.
I suppose the reporter in me should have kicked in. I should have probably asked her questions about the soybean ice cream. But I was afraid to ask the tough questions. I was afraid she brought some home and would ask me to taste it.
Later, however, I gave some serious thought to the idea of soybean ice cream. I came to a couple of decisions:
First, yuk.
Second, we are doing some weird stuff with our food.
Now before the lectures begin, let me say I understand that we all need to eat smarter and healthier. I eat a lot of salads. I eat things that are lower in fat, lower in sodium. I don’t drink as many soft drinks as I used to. I love fruits and I love vegetables.
But I also like to eat good, country cooking, the kind my mother put on the table when I was kid and the kind she still puts out when I go home to visit. God was at his best when he created country fried steak, fried pork chops and meatloaf.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with eating a bacon double cheeseburger, either, unless you eat two of them at one sitting, with a bag of Doritos as a side and a full bag of Oreo Double-Stuf cookies for dessert.
And there’s nothing wrong with eating an occasional bowl of real ice cream, either.
Eat enough of it, I suppose, and you’ll outweigh the cow who gave the milk that was used to make the ice cream. But if you hold it down to a couple of bowls a week, you’ll be just fine.
They call it moderation.
We can’t leave our food alone. We either create something that takes like chewing Styrofoam, and you’re expected to choke it down just because it’s good for you. Or we take something that was perfectly fine in the first place and we change it, just because we can.
Take the aforementioned bacon double cheeseburger. Seems simple, right? Ground beef patty, cooked medium. Slice of cheddar or American cheese. Three slices of bacon. Sesame-seed bun.
But there’s one restaurant I frequent that wants to make ordering a cheeseburger a complicated endeavor. They offer seven or eight types of cheese, and three or four different types of bread. To my way of thinking, if the cheese isn’t orange and the bun doesn’t look like the Colonial buns you buy at the grocery story, it’s not really a cheeseburger.
Sometimes for lunch, I get a salad and a bowl of soup. But one of my favorite lunch places has started messing with their soups.
I ordered a garden salad and a bowl of chicken noodle soup. But the soup didn’t look like any chicken noodle soup I’d ever eaten. The chef had made the soup with rotini pasta, rather than the regular chicken noodle soup noodles.
“Did you run out of the regular chicken noodle soup noodles,” I asked my waitress.
“No,” she replied, “the cook’s just trying to be creative.”
I don’t want creative. I don’t want sushi. I don’t want mushrooms, something that tastes like it sounds, with emphasis on the “mush.” I don’t want fried chicken in different flavors. I don’t want some breakfast cereal from Europe.
And I don’t want any soybean ice cream.
Some things just ain’t fit to eat.
