Adventures in Culinary Excellence

One of my young relatives has returned from three months in China on a college exchange-program thing, and regaled us on many points of Chinese culture, politics, economics, and climate. Perhaps the most interesting items he reported were some of the things they ate on a regular basis, and he, to his credit, I guess, sampled.

Scorpions and big hairy spider shiskabobs.

This got me thinking. What was the weirdest / most disgusting / most unusual things I ever ate?

Well, I can’t hold a candle to arachnid consumption. Basically, Hopper is a conservative fellow, and that applies even more so to my appetites. In my bachelor days I was a pretty regular eater: Chinese food, pizza, hamburgers, soup, pasta. Repeat. Now that I’m older, married with children, and the pounds don’t melt off as soon as I merely think about exercising, I’m more responsible in my choices: fish, vegetables, brown rice and pasta, oatmeal, fruits. Of course, I still eat the pizza and hamburgers, too, but not as frequently as I used to.

But in my bachelor days (before I met the current Mrs. Hopper, that is, a roughly eight-year period since moving out of the parental house and moving in with her), I would eat stuff off the beaten track.

I sampled the requisite bachelor staple, Wheaties and beer, but only on one occasion. Once was enough for that delicacy.

For some reason I remember eating a lot of white rice with a can of gravy mixed in. Mmm-mmm, delicious. Write me for the recipe.

Once I cooked myself a whole package of macaroni and cheese. Not satisfied with the cheesy goodness of the Kraft company, I threw it in a bowl, added about a cup of shredded Mozzarella and a couple tablespoons of Parmesan cheese, threw the whole thing in the microwave for two minutes, and wolfed it down. My arteries literally hardened like a 1970s-child’s-clay-ashtray-for-mom-in-a-kiln within minutes of consumption.

Another time I was out at a work event, something sponsored by the sales department because we made our month goals. Appetizers were served, and I bit into something that tasted like a six-month old kitchen sink sponge. At least, what I imagined one might taste like. Smelled horrible, too, especially coated in a fine layer of stinky cheese. I offered one to the General Sales Manager, whose faced contorted into a catcher’s mitt in front of my very eyes.

For most of those eight years my dessert of choice was Snackwell cookies. You know, those devil’s food cake semi-soft sweets made from more chemicals at a DuPont factory and built to survive the Third World War. I must’ve eaten – seriously – nearly four thousand of them, if my calculations are correct (two boxes a week over a four-year period … and that’s a conservative estimate). Sadly, they didn’t exactly bowl over my future wife at the time. Even jokes that our wedding cake would be one giant Snackwell cookie were met with icy stares.

So, nothing that rivals my relative’s experiences in the Far East. Though I did have the opportunity to eat Pigeon while in Paris a few months ago, but I couldn’t quite convince myself to eat one of those fat, harmless omnipresent birds we’d see everywhere we went in the City of Lights.